Dr. Sanjay Rai, Vice President and Provost, Montgomery College Germantown Campus, is an outspoken champion and ardent supporter of innovations that advance community college student success in academic, career, technical, and workforce development programs. Dr. Rai is the chief executive and academic and student services officer of the Germantown Campus, providing leadership to a fast-growing campus that enrolls over 6,800 students and has 445 full- and part-time faculty, staff, and administrators. The campus offers comprehensive academic programs in humanities, social sciences, education, business, and sciences. The campus also has a well-respected biotechnology program that is the largest in the state of Maryland. In addition, the campus has the complete first two years of engineering programs. The College’s Center for Teaching and Learning and the Office of Distance Education and Learning Technologies are housed at the campus.
The Germantown Campus has solid partnerships with high technology industries, universities, and the government to provide invaluable education and training opportunities for students. To support this effort, a major new state-of-the-art Bioscience Education Center is scheduled to open to students in 2014. This $87.9 million facility is supported by the State of Maryland and Montgomery County. The Bioscience Education Center complements the recently opened Germantown Innovation Center, an on-campus, County-operated business incubator which has 30 start-up companies providing many opportunities for students and faculty. A planned on-campus Science and Technology Park recently signed its anchor tenant and is scheduled to be home to several thousand technology employees.
Prior to serving as vice president and provost of the Germantown Campus, Dr. Rai was the dean of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (SEM) at the Rockville Campus where he led advocacy efforts that resulted in full funding for the $74 million, 140,700 square-foot Rockville Science Center scheduled to open for fall 2011 classes. He led a team of architects, faculty, and staff on the building’s state-of-the-art design, a building that will accommodate considerable growth and interest in SEM courses and degree programs. He secured several nationally competitive grants for science and engineering programs. Of special note are a $471,142 grant from the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for Project Portal to Success in Engineering (a multi-year program to increase the number of underrepresented students in engineering) and a four-year, $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) for “ACCESS Engineering” (Achieving Community College Excellence, Success, and Scholarship in Engineering). Dr. Rai is a graduate of Leadership Montgomery’s Class of 2009 and serves on the Board of Directors for Leadership Montgomery, the Gaithersburg Germantown Chamber of Commerce, and the BlackRock Center for the Arts. Dr. Rai also served on the Montgomery County Commission for Women and on the Governor's Taskforce on Aerospace Workers. Dr. Rai led several teaching innovation efforts in the SEM area, including the course redesign project for developmental mathematics courses.
Advancing external College relations, Dr. Rai was instrumental in obtaining memoranda of understanding with Montgomery County Public Schools, Georgia Tech, and George Washington University. He spearheaded involvement in internship/research experiences for undergraduates (REU) which has resulted in several Montgomery College science and engineering students participating in internships and National Science Foundational REU programs across the nation. Dr. Rai was instrumental in developing the partnerships that resulted in a $190,000 grant from the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. Extending the College’s impact, the India Initiative grant provided 100% of the funding for a group of faculty, staff, and administrators to visit India to host a national symposium on the role of community colleges in workforce development and to engage in dialogue and action planning on mutually beneficial goals to enhance capacity building.
Dr. Rai completed a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, an M.S. in mathematics from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and an M.S. in mathematics and a B.S. in statistics, physics, and mathematics from the University of Allahabad in India. Prior to his tenure at Montgomery College, he was chair of the Department of Mathematics at Jacksonville University, Florida, where he also was a tenured full professor. He has received several awards for teaching and scholarship and has authored numerous scholarly articles and other academic publications. His publications are in applied mathematics (modeling HIV using differential equations) and mathematics education. Dr. Rai’s most recent book, Pathways to Real Analysis, was published in April 2009.