Leading Massachusetts: MassLive’s 8 higher education leaders (2025)

Massachusetts is known for its higher education.

Filled with highly regarded private and public education and renowned scholars, the state is brimming with people who are forging our future.

Below are MassLive’s picks for top higher education leaders across the state who are on the ground and contending with turbulent and uncertain times.

They include presidents leading renowned public and private institutions, researchers and professors. MassLive’s team, led by higher education reporter Juliet Schulman-Hall, chose these leaders based on research and interviews.

Stéphane Willocq

What is dark matter? It is the basis for how we understand the universe. However, we don’t know what it is made of.

Stéphane Willocq, 61, as the first U.S. spokesperson, equivalent to an executive director, for the ATLAS experiment in Switzerland, is helping to lead scientists in discovering dark matter particles.

Uncovering the nature of dark matter is crucial for scientists to better understand how the universe formed and continues to function.

Beyond dark matter, the experiment also searches for new kinds of particles that have been proposed.

The ATLAS experiment is a collaboration of approximately 6,000 scientists worldwide and 1,200 doctoral students.

“This is quite a big responsibility to make sure that we are working as a collaboration as effectively as we can using our financial resources, our human resources, the best we can,” said Willocq, who is also a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Many of those students and scientists are from Massachusetts, including UMass, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard University and Tufts University.

The scientists recently earned the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, also called the “Oscars of science.”

• Read more: New UMass research may upend mining industry essential for batteries

During Willocq’s time at ATLAS, the experiment discovered the Higgs boson particle in 2012, which is fundamental to understanding how other particles acquire their mass.

Willocq is directly involved in studying the properties of the Higgs boson, which is the center of “profound puzzles in our understanding of the universe,” he said.

Pam Eddinger

After leading the largest community college in Massachusetts for more than a decade, President Pam Eddinger, 65, is helping to pave a new future of access for students entering Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.

Since the launch of free community college in the fall of 2024, enrollment has jumped, and Eddinger is taking advantage of it. She works to keep high school and adult learners from gateway cities in college.

Bunker Hill’s ability to cater to adult students is their “superpower,” Eddinger said.

Using federal grants as a Hispanic-serving institution and an Asian and Pacific-serving institution, Eddinger has streamlined English as a second language courses to enable students to complete them more quickly.

• Read more: Why marginalized students are landing one of Boston’s best museum internships

Eddinger also created five career pathways so that when a student comes into the institution, they can be shepherded through the college to complete their degree instead of feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed by career path options.

The pathways also allow faculty to tag someone in the online system to alert the advising team if a student needs extra support, helping students complete their degrees or courses of study.

Expanding the college’s Learn and Earn program, which is its paid internship program, and beginning to offer degree apprenticeships have also been crucial in helping students become better equipped to enter the workforce.

“We’re becoming the glue so that the other sectors are fed,” Eddinger said. “This is how community vibrancy happens.”

Erick Berrelleza

In a higher education landscape where colleges are closing, the creation of Messina College last year was new — and unique.

The two-year college serves first-generation high-financial-need students at the former Pine Manor College campus in Brookline. Its inaugural class is 110 students and it is recruiting for its second class.

• Read more: Everyone is a first-generation student at this new Massachusetts college

At the helm of the new college is Erick Berrelleza, 41, the founding dean of the institution. As a first-generation student himself, he said he understands the “sink-or-swim model“ that first-generation students face when entering higher education.

If Messina students maintain a 3.4 GPA or higher during their two years there, they can enroll in Boston College as residential students.

Students can also live off-campus by joining the Woods College program, which allows students to take classes part-time or at night if they work during the day.

Messina College is also creating four-year institution partnership agreements for students to transfer to if they decide against entering the workforce full-time or continuing their education at Boston College.

Berrelleza is working to support students from the moment they step into college, especially by letting their voices be heard to help shape the early stages of the program.

“I tell them that we are sort of co-creating in a lot of ways,” Berrelleza said.

Danielle R. Holley

When Danielle R. Holley, 50, became the president of Mount Holyoke College, a gender-diverse women’s college in South Hadley, in July 2023, she had a clear mission: educating a new generation of women and increasing the number of female scientists.

“Women are still lagging behind in terms of being CEOs or being Ph.D.s or running for public office and winning. We want to equip our students who are women and people who are marginalized on the basis of their gender to really be able to break barriers,” Holley said.

Mount Holyoke is first in the nation in terms of the number of women who earn doctorates in the life sciences, Holley said.

• Read more: Why women, college presidents of color are resigning and what to do about it

Now, more than ever, as diversity, equity and inclusion are being dismantled by the Trump administration, Holley said Mount Holyoke is investing in students to make sure they have the opportunity to pave the way for other women to get into male-dominated fields.

One way Holley has achieved this is by creating a new faculty research institute to help students take two subjects they are interested in and blend them together. For instance, if a student wants to learn about biology and art, they can study the science of medical drawings.

“Mount Holyoke was founded because women weren’t included in higher education,” Holley said. “We are kind of clear examples of the way in which higher education has never been inclusive, and so it’s important to have institutions like ours.”

Peter Shea

As the increase in enrollment fueled by free community college has placed additional pressures on faculty and employees, Peter Shea, 58, is using artificial intelligence to alleviate some of those burdens.

“We have all these students who will be coming to our community colleges, and we need to figure out ways to meet the needs of these new student populations,” Shea said. “And we want to be able to respond to each of them in a way that makes them feel welcome and included.”

Shea, the assistant dean for AI integration at Middlesex Community College, created a series of AI tools for faculty and students, including one that helps faculty craft syllabi and curricula.

• Read more: AI is leading to cheating in higher ed — and leaders aren’t prepared

He has also created an AI tool to allow students to practice what they have learned even after they have finished the course or left the college.

Shea plans to create a learning library where he can put all of the AI tools he and others are developing or have created to share across the Massachusetts community college system.

Tyra Good

In a state consistently viewed as a national leader in education, Massachusetts is still trying to rebound from the pandemic, especially in literacy.

Low-income students and students of color are the ones struggling the most.

Tyra Good is helping to address the decline.

Through her work at the Western Massachusetts Literacy Collaborative and in her position as the founding faculty director at the Center for Equity in Urban Education at Elms College in Chicopee, she has been paving the way for diversifying and making education more equitable.

The Western Massachusetts Literacy Collaborative is a partnership between Elms College and the Springfield Public Schools and other higher education institutions.

Through the collaborative, Elms College students work in public school classrooms over the summer to help students advance their reading skills. The program has grown from 16 teachers in 2023 to 36 in 2024, Good said.

• Read more: Massachusetts education ranked No. 1, but not for all students

At Elms, Good leads the center with a mission to increase the number and diversity of qualified and licensed educators and school leaders.

This is to ensure that educators understand how to support students from various backgrounds and cultures.

The center offers both bachelor’s and master’s degree completion program pathways and provides support for full-time, non-licensed teachers and paraprofessionals to obtain initial licensure.

" We’re supporting the students, but in essence, we are also helping to break generational cycles of poverty," Good said.

Noe Ortega

After a decade of public undergraduate enrollment declines in Massachusetts, the state has been making up lost ground. That is in large part due to Noe Ortega, 50, the Commissioner of Higher Education.

Ortega helped launch free community college last year and the creation of the MASSGrant Plus Expansion, which covers tuition and fees for Pell Grant-eligible students attending public colleges and universities and reduces costs for many middle-income students.

Since the launch of free community college, enrollment has increased by 14%, adding nearly 10,000 new students, according to data released in October 2024. There has also been a small bump in enrollment across Massachusetts’ nine state universities.

• Read more: Mass. community college enrollment grows by 10K in 1st year of free program

" I think a lot about how we need to think about higher ed looking differently and acting differently for new learners," Ortega said.

He isn’t stopping at making higher education more affordable — he wants to make it more equitable.

Ortega pointed to a downward trend in the Department of Education’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completion in the state, which has declined, especially among low-income and brown and Black people.

Being more aggressive in campaign strategies and promoting the FAFSA will be integral to the state as it continues to add new learners.

• Read more: State board sounds alarm as fewer Mass. students seek federal aid

While investment in higher education is changing and the state is “finding ourselves having to do more with less,” he is excited to expand early college programming and technology use to address increasing student needs, such as mental health support or flexible learning.

Marty Meehan

Marty Meehan, 68, has led the University of Massachusetts system to become the single largest contributor of college-educated workers in the state.

Most notably, healthcare and STEM degrees have increased under his leadership. One-third of UMass degrees per year are STEM degrees, making the institution the largest producer of STEM graduates in the state, according to the institution.

Meehan has also increased research funding at UMass, jumping from $628 million in 2015 to $826 million in 2024.

Over the near-decade Meehan has led UMass, he has also committed to increasing the accessibility and affordability of UMass.

Despite reported declines in diversity post-affirmative action at many institutions across the state, UMass Amherst and UMass Boston reported having the most diverse classes of students in the university’s history last year.

• Read more: Top colleges are losing diversity. State and community schools are seeing a boost

The institution increased need-based financial aid, growing it by 79% or $422 million since 2015. UMass also announced last year it would be offering free tuition and fee support for in-state undergraduates whose families earn $75,000 or less a year.

“One of the things I did as soon as I became president is I committed any increase in tuition — that we take a portion of it and put it into university-funded financial aid,” said Meehan, the first UMass alum to lead the institutions.