Jenny Knowles Morrison

Dr. Jenny Knowles Morrison is the Director of Programming for Handel Group’s Education Division. She comes to Handel Group after a twenty year career as a Management, Public Policy, and International Development specialist. She is an Organizational Behavior, Cross-Cultural Management, Organizational Development, and Change Management specialist.  Jenny fell in love with The Handel Method after piloting HG coaching and life design curriculum for her graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jenny holds a PhD in Public Administration from the Wagner School of Public Service, New York University, as well as a master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.  Her teaching specializations include: organizational behavior, leadership, community development, nonprofit and public management, volunteer management, strategic/performance/human resource management, program evaluation, and qualitative research methods.   

She brings a unique perspective to her role as an American educator, having taught and researched around the world.  She has been deeply involved in higher education program creation, development and reform during her tenure in Cambodia and the United Arab Emirates, founding the first master’s level Development Studies program in Cambodia and supporting the launch of the first doctoral program in a private university in the United Arab Emirates.  She is passionate about building educational programming to support future leaders.  

Jenny is a three-time National Science Foundation awardee and widely published, including most recently in the IBM Center for the Business of Government, “Preparing the Next Generation of Federal Leaders: Agency-Based Leadership Development Programs,” the Social Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Public Affairs Education, and Public Administration and Development.  She is also a contributing author to Embedding Culture and Quality for High Performing Multinational Organizations, Migration and the Crisis of the Modern State, and an invited blogger for USAID.

Jenny enjoys raising her 8 and 10 year old daughters in Austin, Texas, being a Girl Scout leader, loving on her pug terrier ‘foster fail,’ and finding joy through gardening, walking, yoga, meditation, and reading.