AUCA FOUNDATION BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Temirlan Moldogaziev

Dr. Temirlan Moldogaziev, or Tima for AUCA friends, is an Associate Professor of Public Finance and Management in the Department of Public Administration & Policy, University of Georgia in the United States. His primary research and teaching interests are in subnational public finance, state and local capital markets & regulation, municipal market intermediaries & innovations in financial securities. In public administration, he conducts research on organizational management, performance, and implementation of public sector innovations. Tima’s most recent work has been published in journals such as Public Budgeting & Finance, Public Administration, Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Policy, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, and Urban Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Finance from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. More importantly, Tima is a graduate of AUCA, ICP class of 2000, and a former faculty member in the International and Comparative Politics Department at AUCA during 2002-2006. 

Helen Smith

Helen Fox Smith is secretary on the board of the AUCA Foundation.

She has taught in programs for high school students and teachers at Boston University’s College of Communication, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, in Armenia and Zambia, and, through the Soros Foundation, in Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Georgia and Romania. The U.S. State Department’s ACCELS program also sent her to teach in Kyrgyzstan.

At AUCA, she was a visiting teacher from 2006-2010. She has also edited the Writing Handbook for the American University of Central Asia and helped edit its 2007 Catalog.

A Smith College graduate, she began teaching English at the Winsor School in Boston. From 1973-2009 she taught English and journalism at Newton North High School in Newtonville, Mass.

She is the executive director of the New England Scholastic Press Association.

Jonathan Becker

Jonathan Becker is the Director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, where he also serves as Vice President and Dean of International Affairs and Civic Engagement, Associate Professor of Political Studies, and Director of the Global and International Studies Program.

Through Bard, Dr. Becker provides support to several of Bard’s international partner universities including Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences/ Smolny College (St. Petersburg, Russia), Al-Quds University (Palestine), and AUCA, where he has served on the board since 2008.

He is the author of Soviet and Russian Press Coverage of the United States: Press, Politics and Identity in Transition (1999, 2002) and articles and chapters in a variety of publications, including the European Journal of Communication, Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, and the Globalist, among others. Previously, he served as Assistant Vice President of the Central European University in Budapest and the European Director of the Civic Education Project.

He has also served as co-chair of the Higher Education Group of the US/Russian Civil Society Partnership Program and as a consultant to the National Intelligence Council on its Global Trends 2020 project. Dr. Becker earned his BA from McGill University and his D. Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford. 

Ellen Hurwitz

Ellen S. Hurwitz, educator, is an award-winning professor of history and past president of three institutions of higher learning, most recently American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan where she was designated President Emerita in June, 2010 and Executive Director of that University’s Foundation. 

She holds a BA from Smith College and a PhD in Russian and Byzantine History from Columbia University, where she later served as Chair of the University Seminar on Slavic History and Culture. In residence at Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute, she has been Senior Fellow at the Institute of International Liberal Education at Bard College and serves as an education consultant with Stevens Strategy. She is the author of books and articles about early Russian History, comparative history, and the significance of the liberal arts.

Since her return to the United States in August, 2010 she has been speaking and writing about leadership and the liberal arts and working on projects in education, leadership and the arts.
Her three children and five grandchildren reside in New Orleans and Moscow.

Emita Hill

Emita Hill is Chancellor Emeritus of Indiana University Kokomo and former Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Lehman College, City University of New York.  Her primary field of research is 18th century French Literature.  Along with numerous articles she published the Edition Critique of Denis Diderot's correspondence with the sculptor

Falconet  responsible for the St. Petersburg statue of Peter the Great.  Recently she published Bronx Faces and Voices: Sixteen Stories of Courage and Community.  A member of the New York Women's Forum she is currently working on two other oral history projects.  A resident of New Rochelle, New York, she is the mother of three children and grandmother of seven.

Martha Merrill

Scott Horton

Scott Horton is the director of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, president of the International League for Human Rights, chair of the U.S.-China Education Foundation, director of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, and a trustee of AUCA. Mr. Horton has been a partner of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler LLP since 1990. He also works as an adjunct law faculty at Columbia Law School. Mr. Horton has served on the AUCA board since 1999. 

Tilek Sargazakov

Alumnus, AUCA

Natalya Yassinskaya

Senior Organizational Consultant,

Washington Post

Matthew Nimetz