| Former Senior Fellow Zbigniew Bochniarz received University award for international work
Former Senior Fellow Zbigniew Bochniarz received the University of Minnesota's
2006 Award
for Global Engagement for outstanding contributions to global education
and international programs. The annual award is sponsored by the Office
of the Senior Vice President for System Academic Administration and administered
by the Office of
International Programs.
Pictured are Zbigniew Bochniarz, Senior Vice President Robert Jones,
Meredith McQuaid, and Harry Lando
Bochniarz has worked throughout his career to increase the exchange of ideas,
faculty, interns, curricula, and students across cultures, borders, and oceans.
His interests center on sustainable development of economies in transition.
As director of the Humphrey Institute’s Center for Nations in Transition
for 12 years, he helped countries in Central and Eastern Europe move from a
command to a market economy. He designed and administered training programs
for entrepreneurs, managers of large state enterprises, academics, and environmental
NGOs. Under his leadership, the Humphrey Institute and other faculty at the
University developed and delivered four multi-year education projects that trained
more than 42,000 participants.
During Bochniarz's career at the Humphrey Institute, he built valuable networks
of scholars, policy makers, students, businesses, and NGOs throughout Central
and Eastern Europe and tied them to Europe and the United States. He facilitated
the exchange of information between colleagues in Europe and at the University,
resulting in the implementation of new joint master’s degree programs and
partnerships.
Bochniarz has taught at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania,
teaching thousands of students about best environmental practices in business,
government, and everyday life. He helped bring America closer to Romania, assisting
with a difficult transition from communism to a democratic society.
His institution building has gone beyond academia to building new economic,
political, and non-governmental institutions. Bochniarz has been called “a
master at building effective collaborative networks in many different cultures
with many different languages.”
Born in Poland, Bochniarz holds a doctorate in economics from the Warsaw School
of Economics, where he was an associate professor. Since 1999, he has been an
honorary professor at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Poland and holds
an honorary doctorate from the University of Miskolc in Hungary.
Bochniarz is the author and/or editor of more than 80 publications, including
15 books. He is a founding member of independent environmental think tanks in
Budapest, Prague, Sofia, Warsaw, and Katowice, and he leads a multi-year training
project on business management curriculum reform and academic capacity building
in Ukraine.
As an international scholar he continues to work on collaborative and interdisciplinary
research focused on the transformation process in Central and Eastern European.
He is currently working on an executive program on the microeconomics of competitiveness
for the State of Minnesota.
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