Siva Kumari

CEO, College Possible

Siva Kumari served the International Baccalaureate (IB) for 12 years, leaving as the only woman to have served as its Director General (Global CEO) managing curricular and assessment services for K-12 schools. She held this role for over seven years, following her role as the Global Chief Operating Officer. The IB is a multi-national not-for-profit with offices in Geneva, Hague, Cardiff, Singapore and Washington DC serving 7,300 programmes offered worldwide in over 5,400 schools in 158 countries working with a large network of stakeholders including schools, ministries of education, universities, teachers, examiners and heads of schools.

Prior to joining the IB, Siva spent 15-years at Rice University as the first Associate Provost for K-12 Initiatives having served as Associate Dean prior to that. In her career at Rice, she won competitive US National Science Foundation funding, local and national corporate foundation funding, and national and regional awards for her research and work in teaching and learning in both higher and K12 education. She led the creation of a Master’s for school principals called Rice Educational Entrepreneurship program that included an MBA. She also developed the largest training institute in USA for advanced placement teachers; and, she developed a Digital Library for AP Science subjects as part of the National Digital Library Initiative.

Siva has a Bachelor of Science degree from India, a Master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, and a Doctorate in Education from the University of Houston, Texas, USA in online learning for which she received an outstanding doctoral award. For her work in international education, she has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Amity University in India.