Cornell Johnson Dean Vishal Gaur Among 3 New GMAC Board Members

Cornell Johnson Dean Vishal Gaur is one of three new members of the GMAC board of directors

The Graduate Management Admission Council has named three new members to its board of directors, along with a new pair of board co-chairs, as the nonprofit continues to push initiatives around affordability and access in graduate business education.

GMAC, which owns the GMAT exam and counts leading business schools worldwide among its members, announced Wednesday (July 15) that Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management Dean Vishal Gaur is among the three new members. The others are Shelly Heinrich, senior assistant dean of graduate admissions and the career management center at Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business; and Clare Norton, senior associate dean of enrollment management, overseeing recruitment, admissions, and financial aid for Columbia Business School.

Terms for all three began July 1.

MORE ON WHO’S JOINING THE BOARD

Gaur has led Cornell Johnson as the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean since 2023, after joining the B-school’s faculty in 2007 and serving as associate dean for MBA programs from 2014 to 2019. In that earlier role, he built out the school’s Digital Technology Immersion program and later created Johnson’s Master of Science in Business Analytics degree. His scholarship centers on data-driven supply chain and retail operations research, and he holds a Ph.D. from Wharton, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, and an undergraduate degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Heinrich joined SMU Cox in August 2024, arriving with two decades of admissions, recruitment, and career services experience across five business schools. At Cox, she oversees a staff of 40 charged with enrolling more than 900 new students a year while also running the school’s employer-facing career center. At Georgetown she led the integration of Salesforce and Adobe Marketo into the admissions operation along with development of a behavior-score and scholarship-yield model. She has also served as faculty for GMAC’s own Admissions Institute for New Professionals.

Norton has run enrollment for Columbia since January 2023. She spent more than 17 years in enrollment leadership roles before CBS, including at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and at the City University of New York, and began her career as a trader at Citigroup before moving into higher education administration.

NEW CO-CHAIRS AT THE TOP

In other board moves announced by GMAC, Jay Nibbe, a board member since 2020, has been elected board co-chair alongside Catherine Duggan, director (dean) of the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, who joined the board in 2022 and has chaired it since 2025. Nibbe spent 35 years at EY, which he joined in 1985 and where he later served as global vice chair for markets before retiring, overseeing the firm’s accounts across every service line, sector, and geography.

Duggan, who earned her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford, previously taught at Harvard Business School for nearly a decade, becoming the first woman in the school’s history to win its Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Required Curriculum in consecutive years. She was the founding vice dean of the African Leadership University School of Business in Rwanda before taking over UCT’s GSB in 2020.

GMAC’S TAKE

GMAC frames the appointments as part of a broader push on affordability and access. The organization has partnered with private loan provider Ascent Funding to give candidates clearer financing pathways, and it recently unveiled GMAT Superscore, a feature letting candidates combine their best section scores across multiple GMAT attempts when applying to programs.

“We are pleased to welcome these accomplished individuals to the Board at a defining moment for graduate management education,” Joy Jones, CEO of GMAC, says in a news release announcing the new board members. “As candidate expectations and workforce demands continue to evolve, GMAC is committed to ensuring excellence in recruiting and enrolling tomorrow’s business leaders.

“Our new board members bring deep leadership experience and a strong understanding of the evolving education and talent landscape, and their guidance will help shape GMAC’s next chapter as we strive to broaden the pipeline of business talent for schools and employers around the world.”

GMAC also thanked four departing board members for their service: Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou, dean and Richard P. Simmons professor of finance at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business; Ian Fenwick, director of Chulalongkorn University’s Sasin School of Management; Sanjiv Kapur, an independent consultant; and Themin Suwardy, associate provost of postgraduate professional education at Singapore Management University.

DON’T MISS GMAC TO LAUNCH A TOOL THAT LETS APPLICANTS SUBMIT THEIR BEST GMAT SCORES and THE NEW GMAT SUPERSCORE: WHAT MBA APPLICANTS NEED TO KNOW

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