KCC Senior Staff

Colleen Davy, PhD
Dean of Institutional Research, Assessment and Effectiveness

Currently serving as the dean of institutional research, assessment and effectiveness, Dr. Colleen Davy has been at Kingsborough Community College since 2021. She started as the director of assessment and transitioned to the Office of Institutional Effectiveness in 2022. In her role, she oversees the annual assessment and reporting of student learning in academic departments and administrative, educational, and student support offices across the College; manages the analysis and sharing of data for institutional research; provides guidance and leadership for institutional effectiveness research; and supports strategic planning and reporting. She also serves as the College’s accreditation liaison officer to Middle States and is co-chair of the CUNY Assessment Council.

Before coming to Kingsborough, she was director of assessment and academic quality at the New School and an associate director in the faculty assessment and development team in the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University. At Columbia, she developed programs and processes to evaluate instructional effectiveness and provide targeted support for faculty to develop their pedagogical skills and create high-quality experiences for students.

She has extensive experience as an adjunct faculty member at colleges including Brooklyn College and Columbia University, where she has taught undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in psychology, research design, and storytelling with data. She also worked as an assessment specialist at Educational Testing Service (ETS), where she created psychology subject tests (AP, CLEP, and GRE). Additionally, she served as an outside item writer for ETS and the College Board, creating test prep materials for the AP psychology program.

Davy holds bachelor’s degrees in psychology, linguistics, and Spanish from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a predoctoral fellow in the Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER). Her research focused on second language acquisition and leveraging psychology and psycholinguistics research to create effective learning environments for students.