Kris Brandenburger, Ph.D.

Kris has more than twenty years’ experience working with adult learners in academic programs at all degree levels. She has also worked in academic administration as a program chair, associate dean, dean, accreditation liaison officer (ALO) and chief academic officer at three different institutions. She is currently Dean of Extended and Global Education and ALO at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).

Her personal interests include bicycling, opera, and the arts in all forms. She is a published writer in several genres.
Before becoming an accidental academic, she owned and was principal technician at an electrical workshop in west Berkeley where she specialized in the electrical systems of vintage racecars and cars undergoing complete restoration. Because she was working on cars or their electrical bits that had never been mass-produced, there wasn’t much information available on the arcana of the electrical systems. It was the gap between what she was known and what she needed to know that first had her become serious about research. It helped to work from an associative mind-map rather than a more linear approach to the work.

She is deeply engaged in cultures of inquiry and learning, and she wonders slant.