Francisco Marmolejo

Francisco Marmolejo is President of Higher Education at Qatar Foundation (QF), where he leads support and coordination activities to the unique ecosystem of eight prestigious universities that offer more than 70 undergraduate and graduate programs to students from 60 countries at QF’s Education City, the largest campus of its kind globally, based in Doha, Qatar.

He joined QF in February 2020 as the organization’s Education Advisor. From 2012 to 2020, he worked at the World Bank, where he served as the Global Head of the Bank’s Solutions Group on Higher Education, based in Washington, D.C., and, more recently, as Lead Higher Education Specialist for India and South Asia, based in New Delhi. While at the World Bank, he provided advice and support to higher education projects in more than 60 countries, including his role as Leader of the Higher Education Governance Benchmarking Project in the Middle East and North Africa region.

From 1995 to 2012, he served as founding Executive Director of the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration at the University of Arizona, where he also worked as Assistant Vice President and Affiliated Researcher at the Center for the Study of Higher Education. Previously, he has been an American Council on Education Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Academic Vice President of the University of the Americas in Mexico, and International Consultant at OECD in Paris. Currently, he serves on the Board of Directors of NAFSA: International Educators Association, and World Education Services, and is a member of the Academic Council of the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation at UNICATT in Italy, and of the Editorial Board of the Internationalisation of Higher Education Journal.

He regularly speaks and writes on a wide range of higher education issues, and his international education experience has taken him to more than 90 countries around the world, where he has worked with universities, governments and international associations on international education projects over more than 30 years. He has received honorary doctorate degrees from his Alma Mater, the University of San Luis Potosi, and the University of Guadalajara in Mexico.