Gale Tenen Spak is Associate Vice President of Continuing and Distance Learning Education at New Jersey Institute of Technology.  She has extensive experience in management and in the development, marketing, funding, evaluation and implementation of professional workforce development and continuing education programs involving collaborations among academe, industry, and government; and utilizing, as appropriate, online instruction.

Under her leadership, 20% or nearly 4,000 NJIT students now enroll in online programs experiencing a quality “virtual classroom®,” which is a term coined by NJIT in the 1980’s.

Before joining NJIT, Dr. Spak was Dean of the School of Professional and Continuing Education at New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, New York, and also served as Director of the Center for Energy Policy and Research, where she managed numerous funded energy information and technology transfer programs in the United States and abroad and wrote various formal reports printed by U.S. Government and distributed by U.S. Department of Energy throughout the country.

Professional Activites & Associations

Her various professional activities and affiliations include:

• serving on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Department of Labor Northern New Jersey WIRED  initiative
• Principle Investigator for the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education Financial Services Sector Innovation Partnership Institute
• Principle Investigator  for the Henry H. Kessler Foundation EmployME! Training Program
• Chair of the NJIT Distance Learning Advisory Committee
• as an external Evaluator of distance learning programs at sister universities for Middle States Commission on Higher Education
• member of the Executive Committee of the Alfred P. Sloan/Virtual University Project
• member of the New Jersey Virtual University Design Team

She writes and widely presents papers on distance learning and continuing education issues.

Education

She earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science from Yale University after participating in an NIMH-sponsored Program of "Advanced Training in Psychology for Political Scientists."  She received a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, phi beta kappa, in Political Science from Brooklyn College of City University of New York.