Kolditz available to discuss Gore visit to Rice

MEDIA ADVISORY

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Kolditz available to discuss Gore visit to Rice

HOUSTON — (Oct. 20, 2017) – Tom Kolditz, founding director of Rice University’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders, is available to discuss Doerr Institute board member Al Gore’s visit to Rice Monday.

The former vice president will speak at Rice’s Tudor Fieldhouse at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 23. Gore, who is chairman of the Climate Reality Project, will present “The Climate Crisis and Extreme Weather.”

The Doerr Institute is the country’s first one-on-one leadership development program offered free to all students and is the only leadership institute that provides individualized coaching and actionable guidance from certified coaches for college students.

“As an advocate on such issues as climate change, Gore is a great example of leadership in action,” Kolditz said.

Kolditz can discuss the institute’s philosophy of leadership development and his approach to a developmental program that coaches students on how to lead without formal authority.

To interview Kolditz or to RSVP for the Gore event, media should contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

Kolditz short biography.

Prior to Rice, Kolditz taught as a professor in the practice of leadership and management and director of the Leadership Development Program at the Yale School of Management.

A retired brigadier general, Kolditz led the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point for 12 years. In that role, he was responsible for West Point’s teaching, research and outreach activities in management, leader development science, psychology and sociology and was titled professor emeritus after retirement. His career has focused on either leading organizations himself or studying leadership and leadership policy across sectors. He served for two years as a leadership and human resources policy analyst in the Pentagon and for a year as a concept developer in the Center for Army Leadership and was the founding director of the West Point Leadership Center. He was instrumental in the design and formation of the Thayer Leader Development Group and is the managing member of Saxon Castle LLC, a leader development consultancy. Kolditz is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army’s second-highest award in order of precedence and was recently bestowed the Warren Bennis award.

Kolditz holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology from Vanderbilt University, three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Missouri.

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Image for download:

Tom Kolditz photo courtesy Rice University
http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/08/Tom-Kolditz-Resized-sniof4.jpg

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Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,879 undergraduates and 2,861 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.