Sarah Pfatteicher
Executive Director, Five Colleges
Dr. Sarah Pfatteicher is the executive director of Five Colleges, Incorporated, a nonprofit entity created 60 years ago to oversee a broad portfolio of collaborative activity on behalf of the member institutions: Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Five College Consortium, as it is more commonly known, is among the most successful, comprehensive, and well-known higher education consortia, offering collaborative academic programs, enterprise initiatives, and community partnerships.
Prior to joining FCI in 2018, Dr. Pfatteicher spent 30 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a variety of administrative, teaching, and research roles, including as an associate dean for academic affairs and research professor, and as a section chief for the campus emergency operations center. She was selected as an American Council on Education Fellow in 2016-17 and has served on the boards of the National Academy of Engineering's Center for Engineering Ethics and Society, New England Public Media, the American Council on Education Council of Fellows (which she currently chairs), the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, and the Association for Collaborative Leadership (where she is currently president of the board). Her 2025 book on leading consortia, Collaborative Thinking, and her 2010 book on 9/11 and other engineering disasters, Lessons Amid the Rubble, are both available from Johns Hopkins University Press.