About Me
Short Bio: Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is Associate Provost for Academic Strategy and Growth at the University of San Diego, where he is also Faculty Director at the Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Sociology at the Kroc School of Peace Studies. He currently holds fellowships at the Aspen Institute and Yale University, and his two latest books, Connective Creativity (Cambridge) and Wicked Problems (Oxford) explore the importance of taking action in challenging times. He lives in California with his better half, the nonprofit executive Jenny Choi-Fitzpatrick.
About Me: I’ve spent the last 20 years conducting research, engaging students, and building institutions. Academically, I have published six books and 50+ articles, received tenure, been promoted to Full, and been designated a “University Professor”, all at the University of San Diego. Administratively, I have served as a Program Director, as the Faculty Director of a Center, on Executive Council of the Senate, on a well-received Joint Provost-Senate Taskforce, on the University’s Strategic Planning Committee, and now as Associate Provost overseeing the University’s research portfolio.
As Associate Provost for Academic Strategy and Growth I have I have sharpened the University’s focus on research and scholarship. In this role I oversee the University’s $90m portfolio of research and contracts—including nearly $17m in R&D funds—and manage the Office of Sponsored Programs with its team of 5. As the University’s IRB Administrator, I oversee a throughput of 600+ IRB proposals each year, a process greatly aided by 2 part-time staff and 12 volunteers.
As Faculty Director of USD’s Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CSIE) I work alongside CSIE’s Executive Director to transform a faculty initiative into a university-wide institution. This has involved a “merger and acquisition” process whereby several projects came under the Center’s umbrella, a process that has resulted in a ten-fold increase of revenue to $2m annually (complementing the revenue generated by the Center’s current $6.5m endowment). I previously directed the University’s Social Innovation Masters Program.
As an institutional entrepreneur I enjoy creating new programs, networks and teams. This has included the creation and co-convening of the GLC Working Group on the Future of Slavery and Emancipation at Yale University and the co-creation and co-leadership of the Art Builds Collective, a California-based 501(c)3 with a large volunteer base and several significant installations, and the founding, leadership, and sunsetting of the award-winning Good Drone Lab. Finally, I am proud to be a member of the International Panel on the Information Environment, an independent and global science organization providing scientific knowledge about the health of the world’s information environment.
My current research has been supported by a number of fellowships and visiting positions:
- Scholar in Residence at the Aspen Global Leadership Network, Aspen Institute (2022-present)
- Visiting scholar at the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University (2022-present)
- Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2020-2021)
- Concurrent Associate Professor (2018-2021) and Visiting Professor (2021-present) of Social Movements and Human Rights at the Rights Lab, University of Nottingham (2018-present)
- Faculty fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics, University of California, San Diego (2020-2021)
- Faculty fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University (2017)
- MIT Publishing Innovation Fellow, Knowledge Futures Group (2020-2021)
I was previously a founding faculty member at the School of Public Policy at Central European University, where I served as a faculty fellow at the Center for Media Data and Society. I earned my PhD in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame, where I was the Assistant Director at the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change and a dissertation fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Prior to academia I worked in human rights advocacy at Free the Slaves, the sister organization of Anti-Slavery International, itself the world’s first and longest running human rights NGO. And a long-long time ago I studied human rights and international security at Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies. Incidentally, this is also where I met my partner, the nonprofit executive Jenny Choi-Fitzpatrick (Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of The Asia Foundation), though we were just kids at the time.
My public-facing publications can be found on Muckrack.
Contact Information
I am @achoifitz everywhere [gmail, twitter, instagram, linkedin]
Literary agent: Jill Marr (Sandra Dijkstra Agency) jill@dijkstraagency.com
Media availability: Lissette Martinez (Univ. San Diego) press@sandiego.edu