Mushtaq Gunja serves as executive director of the Carnegie Classification systems and senior vice president at ACE, where he is in charge of running and reimagining the Carnegie framework. Prior to joining ACE, Mushtaq served as assistant dean in academic affairs at Georgetown University Law Center (DC), where he was in charge of academic policies for the law school, including accreditation, teaching methods, and new programs related to increased educational outcomes. Mushtaq serves as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law and teaches class related to litigation, including criminal procedure and evidence regularly.
Mushtaq also served as the chief of staff to the under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and Deputy Associate White House counsel in the Obama Administration. Before moving to Washington, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore, where he prosecuted a variety of cases, including violent crime, racketeering offenses, drug conspiracies, and financial fraud. His work on the opioid crisis, prescription overdose deaths, and doctors’ prescribing habits earned him three Drug Enforcement Administration awards.
Gunja graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School (MA) and magna cum laude and with honors from Brown University (RI) with a B.A. in political science and diplomatic history.
Sara Gast is the deputy executive director for the Carnegie Classifications, supporting the redesign and development of the Basic and Social & Economic classifications. She joined ACE in May 2022, and prior to that served as the chief of staff and executive director of strategic communications at the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, a K-12 nonprofit that works to ensure every student is taught by an effective educator.
Prior to joining NIET, Sara worked at the Tennessee Department of Education and served as the director of communications for Commissioner Candice McQueen under Governor Bill Haslam. In that position, she led a variety of public-facing initiatives as well as served as the primary spokesperson for the agency, which handled more than 1,000 media requests each year.
Before returning to Tennessee, Sara worked for Education Secretary Arne Duncan at the U.S. Department of Education. During her time at ED, she helped to oversee a number of rollouts and key policy announcements from the Obama White House, including new regulations on for-profit colleges, additional programs and policies to make college more affordable, and key preK-12 reform efforts.
Sara graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in English and sociology.
Kyle Whitman is the Chief Data Scientist of the Carnegie Classifications and Senior Advisor to the President at the American Council on Education. Kyle helps develop the methodology for the upcoming Carnegie Classifications and explores uses of the new classifications in academic and policy research. Kyle has chaired the project’s technical review panel since 2022 and joined ACE full-time in 2024 after serving as Senior Director of Enterprise Planning at Arizona State University. Kyle holds a Ph.D. in public administration and public policy from Arizona State University.
Marisol Morales is the executive director of the Carnegie Elective Classifications at the American Council on Education. In this role, she provides conceptual leadership and operational oversight to the elective classifications’ work in the United States, Australia, and Canada. This includes the collaborative development of and responsibility for all initiatives; oversight and facilitation of relevant national and international advisory committees; conceptualizing and implementing extensive data archives; and developing and enacting a shared vision regarding access to and use of the knowledge produced by the Carnegie Elective Classifications to beneficially guide research, policy, and practice.
Prior to this role, she was the vice president for network leadership at Campus Compact from 2018 to 2022. Morales was the founding director of the Office of Civic and Community Engagement at the University of La Verne from 2013 to 2018 and the associate director of the Steans Center for Community-Based Service Learning and Community Service Studies at DePaul University from 2005 to 2013.
In 2020, she was appointed as a visiting assistant professor of community-engaged scholarship at the University of Central Florida. Since 2021, she has been an adjunct faculty teaching Latino higher education policy in the ENLACE Higher Education Master’s Program at Northeastern Illinois University.
Morales sits on the editorial board of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. She has also served on the editorial advisory board of Liberal Education—a publication of the American Association of Colleges and Universities—and on the board of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. She currently serves as the co-chair of the education committee of The Puerto Rican Agenda of Chicago and on the Illinois Legislative Latino Caucus Foundation as the board designee for 4th District Representative Lilian Jiménez.
Morales holds a bachelor’s degree in Latin American/Latino studies and a master’s degree in international public service management from DePaul University. She earned her EdD in organizational leadership at the University of La Verne in 2020. Her dissertation focused on the community engagement experiences of Latino students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. Morales was born and raised in Chicago with ancestral roots in Puerto Rico.
Carla Ortega Santori is the Strategic Initiatives Manager at the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, where she manages the Carnegie Elective Classification in Leadership for Public Purpose. Prior to this role, she developed learning and development strategies at a leading healthcare company in Puerto Rico. She has also worked as an Executive Recruiter and volunteered as an AmeriCorps VISTA. Ortega Santori holds a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Carlos Albizu University and a B.A. in Psychology from Villanova University. Her doctoral dissertation studied the psychometric properties of the Passion for Work scale in a Puerto Rican population.
Amelia Ortiz serves as the Associate Director of the Carnegie Elective Classifications at the American Council on Education. In this role she provides day-to-day support for the operations and administration of the Carnegie Elective Classifications. She has over fifteen years of experience working in various higher education positions, specifically focusing on developing retention and completion initiatives in Adult Education and Student Development. Amelia earned a Doctorate in Community College Leadership (DCCL) from Ferris State University. She earned a Master of Science in Communication and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. There, she participated and worked in the McNair Scholars Program as an undergraduate and taught Communication 101 as an undergraduate degree.
Amelia brings a strong commitment to community service to her professional roles. As an undergraduate, she facilitated the Children’s Activities at the Whitewater Community Garden, which provided land for those who did not have access to growing their own food. She has served as a mentor to incoming employees participating in employee resource groups. In addition, she volunteers as a mentor for high-achieving high school students from under-resourced communities.
During her tenure at William Rainey Harper College, Amelia was involved in training her peers to support the LGBTQIA community as allies and participated in several committees throughout campus on Finance, Basic Needs, Strategic planning, and numerous other groups. She authored and spear-headed a project, Proyecto de Apoyo- Superando Obstaculos/Project Achievement-Surpassing Obstacles Initiative (PASO), which is an initiative focused on the families and supporters of incoming Latinx/Hispanic students on how to navigate the college system. She was selected as the employee TEDTalk speaker at Harper College in 2019; the theme was “Being Extraordinary,” and she shared how education transformed the trajectory of her life as an adult learner. While living in San Diego, CA, she worked at Ashford University as an Admissions Counselor Lead and volunteered at a local elementary school, tutoring students.
Amelia has participated in numerous organizations like the Truth Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) program that discussed strategies to build relationships, trust, and collective power at the community and institutional levels. Her passion revolves around amplifying the voices of those from marginalized populations.
Cammie Jones-Friedrichs is the Director of the Carnegie Elective for Community Engagement. Cammie, who is originally from Dallas, TX, has spent over 16 years in higher education and nonprofit leadership, continually paving the way for social justice and civic engagement. She is a first-generation college student with a B.S. in Kinesiology from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Higher Education Administration from Louisiana State University A&M.
Cammie recently served as the Director of Strategic Initiatives for Partners for Campus-Community Engagement where she oversaw several dynamic initiatives and programs that enhanced the civic capacity of nonprofit and higher education institutions in Pennsylvania and New York. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Bard Center for Civic Engagement. Cammie worked as an Assistant and Associate Dean of Experiential Learning and Civic Engagement at Bard, where she managed global and domestic engaged learning and campus/community initiatives and supported the Carnegie Classification team, which received classification in 2020.
Furthermore, she has served in high level executive roles at Dutchess Community College, Marist College, Barnard College and Grace Smith House, Inc.
She additionally serves as an adjunct professor at Bard College/ OSUN, where she teaches civic engagement courses. Women and Leadership, Women and COVID 19: Activism, Leadership, and Global Engagement, and Women and the Pandemic are all topics that have been offered. She has also organized several international and domestic conferences on civic engagement, youth leadership development, social justice and women’s rights.
Cammie has devoted her life to service and leadership, sitting on various boards and committees for local NGOs and collecting multiple awards for her contributions to higher education and community engagement. She was recently appointed to the board of directors of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) where she is the Special Programming Co-chair, participates in AACU’s Global Learning Conference Planning Committee and is the Civic Engagement Chair of the Westchester Black Women’s Political Caucus. She also serves on the Sister to Sister International, Inc. Steering Committee.
Cammie has garnered multiple honors for her civic engagement and community development leadership. She was named to the Chamber Foundation Inc.’s 2021 ATHENA Award, as well as the Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce’s 2012 Forty Under 40 Class. Other honors include the N4A 2014 Professional Promise Award for Region 1, the AWCC 2017 Forty Under 40 Class, and the Arc of Dutchess 2017 Peggy Martinko Community Trailblazer Award.