Jorge Balán is a program officer with the Education, Media, Arts and Culture Program of the Ford Foundation in New York. He works in the field of higher education, managing a portfolio with a focus on research and public policy. Before joining the Foundation in 1998, Dr. Balán was executive director of Argentinas National Commission on Higher Education Evaluation. For twenty years he was a senior staff member and director of a private non-profit research organization in the social sciences in Buenos Aires, where he built a team working on higher education policy issues. Dr. Balán has taught at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the University of Oxford, UK; at the Universities of Chicago, Illinois; Texas; and New York; and at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He received a postdoctoral award from the Social Science Research Council in 1973 and a Guggenheim Award in 1977. Dr. Balán earned his undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.