Rob Anderson

Rob works with all 31 USG institutions on initiatives designed to increase college access and support student success. He oversees a wide range of key initiatives including Complete College Georgia, teacher educator preparation programs, and the USG STEM initiative. Formerly, Anderson was the Executive Vice Chancellor for Administration for the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission. While in West Virginia, Anderson acquired and managed several grants totaling more than $20 million and funded by organizations including the Lumina Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, CCA, as well as a federal GEAR UP grant. Each of these grants has been targeted at improving college access and completion. As a native of Augusta, Georgia, Anderson holds degrees from The Citadel (B.A.) and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div.).

Tristan Denley

Before moving to the system office in August 2013, Mr. Denley was Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Austin Peay State University. Originally from Penzance, England, Denley earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Trinity College Cambridge.. At Austin Peay, he created Degree Compass, a course recommendation and pairing system. This system won a platinum IMS Global Learning Impact Award in 2014 and has received recognition from CCA, Educause, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and President Obama. Denley spearheaded the full-scale implementation of corequisite academic support for virtually all Tennessee Board of Regents’ institutions. The scaling of corequisite support was completed after careful analysis of system-level data, ensuring gateway course success of all students.

Loretta Ussery Griffy

Dr. Griffy has worked on a college campus for over 20 years and is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. Currently, she serves the university as the Director for the Center for Teaching and Learning with a primary focus on promoting student success through development, implementation and assessment of initiatives focused on the teaching, learning, and advising environment. She is engaged on campus in developing initiatives that utilize emerging technology to inform student-faculty interaction and focus high impacts. Additionally, she worked as a leader of the team that developed Austin Peay’s coreq model.

German Vargas

Dr. Vargas has been teaching at the collegiate level for the past 13 years and is still involved in classroom instruction of courses. In 2011, he was a key participant in the CCA grant initiative that funded four institutions in the University System of Georgia (USG) to enhance the success rates in developmental programs by incorporating technology and redesigned models of instruction. In January 2013, Dr. Vargas was appointed by the USG to serve as a member of the statewide Task Force on the Role of Mathematics in College Completion. He was subsequently appointed by the USG as chair of the Ad Hoc Steering Committee.. Dr. Vargas was the 2014-2015 Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee on Mathematical Subjects (ACMS) and is the leader of several initiatives including the transformation at scale to adopt open educational resources in Mathematics courses, as part of the Affordable Learning Georgia efforts.