Colleen Thouez

Colleen Thouez brings leadership experience across higher education, philanthropy, global cities, and international organizations.

She currently serves as Vice President for Workforce Development at the National Association of Higher Education Systems (NASH), which represents 90 public university systems encompassing 1,200 campuses and 13.9 million students across the United States, where she focuses on building education-to-employment pathways that strengthen economic and social mobility at the community and regional level.

Her prior senior roles include positions at the Open Society Foundations—where she founded the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) and its Global Cities Fund for Pandemic Relief—and at the United Nations, where she served as Special Advisor to Sir Peter Sutherland, former Director-General of the WTO and UN Special Representative on International Migration. She also served as Head of UNITAR's New York office, among the youngest ever appointed to a UN director-level position. She advises national and municipal governments, regional bodies, private philanthropies, UN agencies, and the World Bank.

As a Robert Bosch Academy Fellow, she examines the intersection of workforce preparedness and democratic resilience.

Colleen holds a Master's from McGill University and a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She has published extensively on city leadership, migration governance, and educational access, and holds or has held academic appointments and/or fellowships at Sciences Po Paris, Columbia University, American University, Duke University, The New School, and Bard College.

Dr. Thouez chairs the advisory council of Europe Prykhystok, an NGO she co-founded in 2022 that has enabled over 2,000 Ukrainian children to spend time away from the war in communities across France, and Germany through city-to-city partnerships. She is also a founding member of the advisory board of the Global Centre for Climate Mobility.

February 2026