Dale Whittaker

Dale Whittaker is Advisor and Principal Officer at the Gates Foundation, where he works at the system and national level to help the field of higher education deliver measurable improvements in people's lives and livelihoods. He brings to the AI Trust Advisory Board the operator's perspective of more than three decades inside public higher education combined with the systems lens of one of the world's largest equity-focused philanthropies. At the Gates Foundation, Dale shapes and stewards portfolios that support equity-focused innovation at scale, with particular focus on how large-serving institutions, digital capacity, and emerging models including artificial intelligence can reduce racial and income gaps in degree attainment for Black, Latino, Indigenous, low-income, and adult learners. His current work centers on four practical building blocks of higher-education system change: using digital tools and AI to improve access, learning, and operations while keeping equity central; reducing cost and risk for learners while increasing the value of credentials; connecting education more directly to work and economic mobility; and supporting durable cross-institutional collaboration. Previously Senior Program Officer Lead at the Gates Foundation, Higher Education Advisor at Grant Thornton LLP, President of the University of Central Florida (UCF), one of the largest public research universities in the United States, and Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at UCF. Earlier Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs and Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University, where he spent more than twelve years on the faculty. His advisory contribution to the Council centers on the educational-institution constituency that the Trust Identity Protocol was built to serve at no cost under TIPCL-1.0, the equity lens that shapes how the protocol reaches underserved learners worldwide, and the philanthropic-foundation perspective that grounds Council deliberations in institutional impact at national and global scale.