About

Jill Derby, PhD, has more than 30 years’ experience working nationally and internationally in higher education governance. Between 1989 and 2006, she served on the Nevada Board of Regents, including three terms as board chair. In 2015, she was a keynote speaker on the topic of board governance at the Middle East North Africa (MENA) Higher Education Summit in Abu Dhabi. She has served as an AGB consultant since 2005 and has been a senior fellow since 2019.

Derby was a founder of the Guinn Center for Policy Priorities, a centrist think tank for economic and educational policy in Nevada. As chair of the Nevada System of Higher Education, she provided critical leadership during a period of rapid growth. She led the initiative to establish Nevada’s first state college, created a board development committee to improve board performance, and focused the board on statewide strategic planning during a transition of system heads. Derby also was involved in policymaking at the state level, serving on the Nevada Supreme Court Gender Bias Task Force, the State Judiciary Selection Commission, and the Nevada Humanities Commission. She served on the Nevada Blue Ribbon Education Reform Task Force and a statewide Community College Task Force.

In 2012, Derby received a U.S. Senate appointment to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which oversees U.S. accreditation of higher education institutions and advises the secretary of education on higher education policy. In 2023, she stepped down after serving seven years as the board chair of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, in Kurdistan.

Derby is the author of When You Dare to Say YES, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2024. Her articles on higher education governance appear in Inside Higher Ed and Trusteeship magazine, as well as in the AGB blog.

Professional Credentials

Derby received her BS from the University of California, San Francisco, and both her MA and PhD from the University of California, Davis.