Dr. Alexander Ramírez, CEOSE Vice Chair
Former Executive Director of Information Technology Initiatives
HACU National Headquarters
San Antonio, TX 78229
Term:  02/01/2009-01/31/2014; Vice Chair Term: 06/01/2012 - Present

Dr. Alexander Ramírez earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees at the University of California, Riverside, and he earned his B.A. degree at California State University at San Bernardino. All of his degrees are in Psychology. Until May 2011, he served as Executive Director of Information Technology Initiatives at the national headquarters of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) in San Antonio, Texas.

In his former role as HACU's Executive Director for Information Technology Initiatives, Dr. Ramírez had many opportunities to represent HACU and address national audiences in the area of Hispanics and information technology (IT). For example, at the request of the chair of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure (CI), Dr. Ramírez provided testimony to the Panel on the role of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) on developing the needed IT workforce of the future in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and for the emerging cyberinfrastructure. Dr.Ramírez collaborated on HACU's testimony to the congressional Web-based Education Commission, and on congressional testimony in support of bills that would support IT for teaching and learning at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). Additionally, Dr. Ramírez, working with colleagues from the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, helped manage and contributed meaningfully to the IBM Hispanic Digital Divide Task Force report on Latinos and Information Technology: The Promise and the Challenge. He also helped develop the HACU Hispanic Higher Education Research Collective (H3ERC) of
outstanding social science researchers in Hispanic higher education. He serves on such advisory committees as the Science Advisory Board for the TeraGrid and the Human Resource Expert Panel for the NSF National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). He was also appointed to the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) where he chaired the Task Force on Cyberlearning and Workforce Development.

Dr. Ramírez has been in the IT field for over 25 years. Prior to joining HACU in 2000, he served as the Director for Academic Technology at the University of Texas at San Antonio (1997-2000). Earlier he served in a number of positions at the University of California at Riverside: Director of Academic Computing (1992-1997), Assistant Director of Academic Computing (1989-1992), Manager of Academic Computing Services (1983-1989), and
Consultant of the Academic Computing Center (1981-1983). Prior to the above appointments, he held a number of positions that included Research Consultant, Visiting Assistant Professor, Lecturer, and Research Associate at the UCLA Spanish Speaking Mental Health Research Center. As part of his Executive level position at HACU, Dr. Ramírez worked as the Hispanic Serving Institutions Community Leader for the NSF-sponsored Advanced Networking with Minority Serving Institutions (AN-MSI) project in strategic partnership with EDUCAUSE, the leading IT professional association in higher education, and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO) that respectively
represent the nation's Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Together HACU, AIHEC, and NAFEO represent over 330 institutions, the vast majority of the nation's minority serving institutions (MSIs). This strategic partnership of HACU, AIHEC and NAFEO continued into the MSI Cyberinfrastructure Institute (MSI-CI2), and the MSI CI Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC) working toward the meaningful engagement of MSIs into cyberinfrastructure. Dr. Ramírez is co-principal investigator on both. He has published in such journals as the American Journal of Community Psychology and the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, and collaborated on or has written various reports, such as, the NSF ACCI Task Force on Cyberlearning and Workforce Development Final Report (http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/taskforces/).

The Director of NSF appointed Dr. Ramírez to membership on the congressionally mandated Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering in 2009.