Dennis Cheek

Dennis Cheek is a Senior Fellow in FPRI’s Wachman Center for Civic and International Literacy.  For fall 2011 through summer 2012 he was a full-time Visiting Professor at the recently created Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship & Philanthropy (ACSEP) at the National University of Singapore Business School. ACSEP will conduct research, create case studies, engage in executive education, develop and deliver courses and programs, and engage and advise interested parties about social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, nonprofit management, CSR, and related matters within an Asian context. The remit of ACSEP includes 34 nations and special administrative regions across Asia. Dr. Cheek is the Principal Consultant for Curriculum, Assessment, and Research to the Universitas Ciputra (UC) in Surabaya, Indonesia (a six-year old private university with 1,800 students), and a consultant to the UC Entrepreneurship Center which works nationwide to increase the number of Indonesian entrepreneurs. Dennis is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and has worked and traveled in 45 nations on five continents.

He was the lead curriculum developer for a DVD-ROM curriculum on micro and small enterprise creation for the International Youth Foundation currently undergoing pilot testing for use with youth organizations throughout the Middle East and Africa. He has been an advisor to the 2010 and 2011 Creativity World Forums and a large-scale pilot program of USAID and NetHope to explore the utility of serious social gaming to advance youth development projects. He has been an annual speaker for the past five years at the Global Village for Future Leaders of Business and Industry operated by the Iacocca Institute at Lehigh University, a six-week program held in both the USA and Malaysia attended by over 1,300 young leaders from 120 nations.

Dr. Cheek has been a lecturer in the midcareer doctoral program in educational leadership of the Graduate School of Education (GSE) and a lecturer in the Wharton School/GSE joint doctoral program for work-based learning at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been an adjunct faculty member or lecturer at nine other colleges and universities, including Pennsylvania State University main campus and Great Valley, University of Rhode Island, University of Maryland European Division, University of Delaware, and Empire State College – SUNY.

Dennis is a former Vice President of Education and Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the largest foundation in the world focused on entrepreneurship. While at Kauffman, he directed national programs in youth entrepreneurship, the future of learning, education research and policy, and science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) education, as well as supervising foundation programs in the Kansas City metropolitan area. He is a former Vice President of Venture Philanthropy at the John Templeton Foundation, senior administrator for 13 years in the state education departments of New York and Rhode Island (RI), state supervisor for nine area career and technical centers in RI, senior manager at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC is a $11 billion company), middle school and high school science and social studies teacher, high school science department chair, and district curriculum developer. He has served on 35 nonprofit boards and was a founding board member of several organizations, including the international Campbell Collaboration and the National Creativity Network (USA).

Dennis has authored, edited or contributed to over 800 publications and multimedia products and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Entrepreneurship & Public Policy and Odyssey, a science magazine for young adolescents. He has served on editorial or manuscript review boards of the International Journal of Technology and Design Education, Journal of Science Education and Technology, Journal of Technology Education, Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, American Biology Teacher, Middle School Journal, Speculations in Science & Technology, Social Education, and The Science Teacher. He is the former editor of the Journal of Technology Studies and STS Today.

Dr. Cheek earned a B.A. in history/secondary education from Towson University, B.S. in biology from Excelsior College, M.A. in historical studies from University of Maryland Baltimore County, Ph.D. in curriculum & instruction/science education from Pennsylvania State University and Ph.D. in theology from Durham University in the UK. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “distinguished contributions to the instigation, funding, implementation, and evaluation of STEM education programs in formal and informal settings and state/national policy making.” Dr. Cheek has been a visiting fellow or scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Hagley Museum and Library, and the Center for Contemporary History and Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation.