West Virginia University’s Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources is hosting Irving Pressley McPhail, president and chief executive officer of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, Inc., as part of its Diversity Week activities.

McPhails’s lecture, “Confronting the ‘New’ American Dilemma; The NACME Strategy,” will be held on Friday, Oct. 25, in Room G102 of the Engineering Sciences Building at 11 a.m. The lecture, which is part of the Statler College’s Distinguished Lecture Series, is free and open to the public.

McPhail was named the sixth president and chief executive officer of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering in 2009, after having served as its executive vice president and chief operating officer since 2007. NACME received the 2012 Claire Felbinger Award for Diversity from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. Prior to joining the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, he founded and served as principal of The McPhail Group LLC.

He served 15 years as a college president or chancellor at The Community College of Baltimore County, St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley and LeMoyne-Owen College. Under his leadership, The Community College of Baltimore County was named one of 12 Vanguard Learning Colleges in the U.S. and Canada in 2000 by the League for Innovation in the Community College; won the Bellwether Award in the category of Planning, Finance and Governance in 2000; and was awarded the PBS O’Banion Prize for Leading the Way to Change in Teaching and Learning in 2003. McPhail also served as chief operating officer of the Baltimore City Public Schools.

McPhail has held tenured full professorships at three colleges and universities, and served as an affiliate or visiting professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Pennsylvania and Morgan State University. Working at the nexus of practice, policy and research in literacy education, post-secondary student success, community college leadership and STEM education, McPhail is the co-editor of Teaching African American Learners to Read: Perspectives and Practices, published by the International Reading Association in 2005, and the author of more than 50 journal articles, chapters, monographs and technical reports.

McPhail earned a bachelor’s degree in development sociology at Cornell University and a master’s degree in reading at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He earned a doctorate in reading/language arts at the University of Pennsylvania as a National Fellowships Fund Fellow.

-WVU-

mcd/10/10/13

CONTACT: Mary C. Dillon, Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources
304.293.4086, Mary.Dillon@mail.wvu.edu

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.