Ashleigh Brown-Grier, Ph.D.

Founder / Executive Director

Ashleigh has over seven years of experience in international education. Her experience as a two-time Fulbright U.S. Student grantee, in Malaysia and South Africa, influenced her decision to pursue a career as an international scholar-practitioner. Her expertise includes program development, internationalization at Historically Black Institutions (HBIs), community engagement, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in international exchange programs, and international comparative education.

Brown-Grier is an independent consultant at Bennett College, where she is redeveloping the general education curriculum, a research fellow at the HBCU Center for Research, Leadership, and Policy, and a Fulbright Alumni Ambassador. Brown-Grier received her Ph.D. in Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies from Howard University. She is a graduate of Talladega College, Morgan State University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Janine Jackson

Programming and Events Director

Janine is a third-year doctoral student and Research Analyst at the Center for Predictive Analytics at Morgan State University. Her research focuses on developing and validating instruments for measuring teachers' affective characteristics and non-cognitive factors in student success, with an emphasis on measurement fairness in large-scale assessments. Janine is a certified teacher in Maryland and Washington, D.C., and spent six years in Abu Dhabi as a Mentor Teacher and Data Coordinator. She currently works part-time at Educational Testing Service (ETS) and is a 2021-2022 White House HBCU Scholar. Janine serves on various committees, including the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) Outreach Committee and the Psychometric Society Graduate Student Committee. She is also the Chair of the Jamaica Diaspora Education Task Force Education Leadership Committee and the Programming and Events Director for the International HBCU Exchange (iHBCUx).

Shondrea McCargo

CFO / Assistant Director

Shondrea McCargo is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Applied Positive Psychology program, which is the scientific study of human flourishing. She hails from Baltimore, Maryland where she received her bachelor's degree from Morgan State University in teaching and has taught in public schools for seven years. Shondrea is currently a graduate assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania for several Masters-Level and Undergraduate certificate level courses. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Malaysia, in which she served as an English teacher. She currently serves at the Institute for International Education (IIE) as an ambassador for the Fulbright Program.

Jonathan Freeman

Communications Director

Jonathan Freeman, Ph.D. is a 2016-2017 Fulbright U.S. Student Grantee where he was a Visiting Researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also a Fulbright Alumni Ambassador for the Fulbright U.S. Student Programs.

Dr. Freeman is an experienced higher education leader and partnership strategist having worked in both non-profit and for-profit education and workforce training companies, and most recently a program manager at IBM. He is also a part-time faculty member at the University of Baltimore teaching in the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Freeman received his BA in History from Lane College, MA in African American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University.