Johannes De Gruyter is a Senior Program Officer, Institutional Transformation at the Postsecondary Success Team of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He leads a portfolio of investments and partnerships focused on the development of public goods that support institutional transformation for equitable student success. Johannes has extensive experience with academic innovation and digital transformation initiatives aimed at advancing lifelong learning and student success, both in the US and abroad.

Before joining BMGF, Johannes was the Executive Director of the Office of Academic Innovation and the Learning Center at Portland State University. He helped create the Office in 2012 as a new integrated model of educational development for faculty across all career stages and learning modalities. The unit was a platform for campus initiatives around student success, based on co-creation, designing thinking and open innovation, including online and flexible degree design, gateway course redesign, OER and Open Pedagogy, Z-degrees, active & adaptive courseware, and learning space design.

In Europe, Johannes led a multi-campus support team at the University of Leuven, Belgium, responsible for media and learning services. He managed a range of EU-funded, multinational projects on education innovation with the European Association for Distance Teaching Universities, and he was the Chair of the Coimbra Group eLearning Task Force.

Johannes is born in Flanders, Belgium in a town called Ieper, known for its devastation in WW1. He has a MA in History from the University of Leuven, and a M.Sc. in East Asian Studies from the University of Amsterdam. He speaks four languages and lives in Portland with Ada and his daughter Astrid.