Director, Continuing & Professional Education
Building learning systems at the intersection of institutional mission, workforce need, and the people both tend to overlook. Columbus State University. Columbus, Georgia.
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As Director of Continuing and Professional Education at Columbus State University, I lead a self-sustaining enterprise serving 3,500+ learners annually across corporate, government, military, and international audiences - with full P&L accountability and no state subsidy. Under my direction, the portfolio reached its strongest financial performance in over a decade.
The programs I have designed and scaled reflect the full complexity of that mandate. Custom capability-building for the U.S. military, statewide workforce programs, corporate training for 450+ insurance professionals, industry credentials embedded directly into existing coursework alongside more than ten faculty members - without rebuilding a single course. An English Language Institute with the only SEVP-approved Bridge Pathway Program in Georgia extends that reach internationally.
I came to this work as a first-generation college student. That context doesn't leave. It shapes what I build and who I build it for. My doctoral research at the University of Georgia - an Ed.D. in Higher Education Administration with a dissertation focused on learning systems governance and workforce-aligned credentials - sits at the center of these questions.
Earlier in my career I worked as a paralegal at the Georgia Innocence Project and conducted cancer genetics research at the University of South Carolina, where I was published as a contributing author in Neoplasia and received fellowships from the USC School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The thread across all of it is the same: systems that should work better for the people inside them.
Sam grew up outside of Charleston, SC, the eldest of three siblings - a role that suited her natural instinct to organize, advocate, and pull everyone forward. She has always been driven by curiosity, sometimes to a fault, and that curiosity led her from a pre-med track and cancer genetics research to the law, to higher education, and eventually to a doctoral program she is completing while running a department, serving on boards, and pursuing a coaching credential simultaneously.
She met her husband Justin in Knoxville, TN. They moved to Georgia shortly thereafter, and she has been in Columbus since Spring 2016. Outside of work and school, she spends time with Justin and their two dogs - Lolly and Window.
Style, for Sam, is not an afterthought. It is a form of communication - a way of being precise about who you are before you say a word. The same instinct that drives her professional work drives her personal aesthetic: nothing generic, nothing unconsidered, everything chosen.
Available for consulting engagements, speaking, and conversation about workforce-aligned education, continuing education enterprise strategy, and higher education leadership.