Wondwosen Tamrat

Wondwosen Tamrat (Associate Professor) is President of St. Mary’s University (SMU), a pioneer private higher education institution in Ethiopia which he founded in 1998. He is an affiliate scholar of the Program for Research on Private Higher Education (PROPHE) headquartered at the State University of New York at Albany, US.

He has an MA degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Addis Ababa University (Outstanding) and another MA in English Language Teaching from the University of Warwick in England (Distinction) and a Graduate Certificate in Quality Assurance in Higher Education from the University of Melbourne in Australia (2012). He received his third Master's degree in Tertiary Education Management from the same University (2016) and is currently following a doctoral program in Higher Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

He has taught at Kotebe College of Teacher Education, Addis Ababa University and SMU in Ethiopia over the last twenty years. His knowledge and experience of the Ethiopian higher education sector embody more than two decades of active participation and dedicated service. He had served as a member of the Higher Education Relevance and Quality Assurance Agency (HERQA) board for two consecutive terms and is now reelected to serve in the same position (2018-).

He is the immediate past vice- president of The Ethiopian Red Cross Society (2013- 2018). He is a board member of the Ethiopian ICT Excellence Centre, Board member and Vice-president of the Association of Private Higher Education Institutions in Ethiopia (2018-), and Jury of the Ethiopian Quality Award.

At the continental level, he serves as the coordinator for the private higher education sub-cluster of the higher education cluster set up to achieve the Africa Union's Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA). He also serves as a member of the International Advisory Board of the International Journal of African Higher Education (IJHEA). He has presented and published several papers on Ethiopian higher education both at national and international fora, including the publication of two books: The Anatomy of Private Higher Education in Ethiopia (2008) and The Evolving Quality Assurance Framework in Ethiopian Higher Education (2012).