Allan Fisher
Senior Vice President, Product Strategy and Development, Laureate Higher Education Group

Allan Fisher is Senior Vice President for Product Strategy and Development at the Laureate Higher Education Group. He previously was co-founder, President and CEO of iCarnegie Inc., an online higher education subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University, and before that served until 1999 as faculty member and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. During that time, he worked in high performance computing and networking research and also led the creation of Carnegie Mellon’s B.S. program in Computer Science. In the late 1990s, he and Dr. Jane Margolis carried out a program of research and intervention that helped to increase the proportion of women entering the computer science program from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000. This work is described in their book, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, published in 2002 by MIT Press.

He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Princeton University, studied at the University of Cambridge, and received the Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He serves on a number of advisory committees for projects and organizations working toward diversity in technology fields, including the Anita Borg Institute and the National Research Council Committee on Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine.