Mark Anderson has been President of Pearson Language Tests since October 2007, prior to which he was Strategy Director for Pearson’s international assessment & testing businesses. He first worked for Pearson in the period 1984-1997 in the UK and Hong Kong, latterly running a regional professional publishing & information business. For 10 years he worked in consumer goods and technology businesses, before rejoining Pearson in April 2007. He was educated at Cambridge University and received an MBA from Ashridge Business School.
Ernest J. Anastasio holds the position of Senior Advisor, International Assessments at Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) in McLean, VA. Anastasio represents GMAC on the Pearson Test of English (PTE) Advisory Council and serves also on the PTE Technical Advisory Group. Anastasio’s ancillary GMAC responsibilities include membership on the GMAT Technical Advisory Committee and participation in policy setting for the GMAT testing program and score reporting services.
Anastasio has more than 40 years of research, development and management experience in high stakes testing and licensing/certification programs. Before joining GMAC in 2004, Anastasio was Chief Education Advisor for Sylvan Ventures, a Baltimore, MD-based education venture capital company. During his tenure with Sylvan Ventures, Anastasio served as the senior education investment specialist in the acquisition, staffing and management of two major US distance learning universities – Walden University and National Technological University
Prior to his position at Sylvan Ventures in 2000, Anastasio served for a period of five years as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Educational Testing Service. Earlier in his 33-year career at ETS, Anastasio held the positions of Vice President, Research; Vice President, Information Systems and Technology; and Senior Vice President, International Development. From the period 1992 through 1998, Anastasio managed and directed the transition of the GMAT, GRE and TOEFL testing programs from paper-pencil format to computerized-adaptive testing.
Anastasio holds graduate degrees in Quantitative Measurement and Psychology from Texas Christian University and Advanced Management from Harvard Graduate School of Business.
Professor Japhet S. Law obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical/Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976. He joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1986 and is currently Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Managerial Economics and the Director of the Aviation Policy and Research Center. He was the Associate Dean and subsequently the Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration from 1993 until 2002. Prior to returning to Hong Kong, Professor Law was the Director of Operations Research at the Cullen College of Engineering and Director of Graduate Studies in Industrial Engineering at the University of Houston, and was also involved with the US Space Program in his career with McDonnell Douglas and Ford Aerospace in the United States.
Dr. Law has consulted with various corporations in Hong Kong and overseas. He is also active in public services, having served as Member of the Provisional Regional Council of the Hong Kong SAR Government and varies other Government advisory committees, and is also active on the boards of for-profit, non-profit, public and charitable organizations in Hong Kong and overseas.
Dr. Law has served on various committees and Board’s of international organizations, including AACSB, Graduate Management Admission Council, and Oxfam International. He is currently the Chairman of the GMAC Asia Pacific Advisory Council.
Dave Wilson combines the professional experience of a certified public accountant, the pragmatism of the CEO and the disciplined thought of an academic. His career in public accounting began with Clarkson, Gordon & Co in Canada (now Ernst & Young LLP). After a ten-year hiatus in academia, he returned to Ernst & Young in Houston where he became an Audit Partner and rose to Managing Partner and National Director of Professional Development.
In 1995, he joined the Graduate Management Admission Council® as its President and Chief Executive Officer. Educated at Queen’s University in Canada (B. Com), the University of California, Berkeley (MBA) and the University of Illinois (PhD), he has served on the faculties of Queen’s University, the Harvard Business School and the University of Texas at Austin, where he was awarded tenure in 1976.
From 2002 until its recent management buyout (MBO), he served as a board member of Laureate Education, Inc. (formerly Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc.) where he chaired the Audit Committee from 2003 until his resignation coincident with the execution of the MBO in July 2007. He has served on the boards of a number of charitable organizations including the Worldwide Board of Directors of Junior Achievement, the Wolf Trap Foundation and the Confrérie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs as its Bailli Délégué in the United States and on the Conseil d’Administration, the worldwide board in Paris. He is also a member of the British North-American Committee.
Casey Marks, Ph.D., is the Chief Operating Officer at NCSBN. He serves as chief operations executive, leading in the development of the strategic plan and in the formulation of programs to advance the mission and vision of NCSBN. With over ten years of experience in large-scale assessment, he has published and presented extensively and is seen as an expert on issues related to adoption and vendor transition of computer-based testing for high-stakes, large-scale testing programs. Casey has a long history of involvement and volunteer service with testing related organizations such as American Education Research Association (AERA), National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), Council on Licensure, Education, and Regulation (CLEAR), and the National Organization for Competency Assurance (NOCA).
Currently Dr. Marks serves as a member on the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Personnel Certification Accreditation Committee, as a commissioner on the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) and as incoming President for the Association of Test Publishers (ATP). Dr. Marks holds a PhD in Measurement, Evaluation and Statistical Analysis from the University of Chicago.
Wolf Hengst was born in Berlin, Germany and raised near Melbourne Australia. He returned to Germany to attend hotel business school in Heidelberg. Hengst trained and worked in Switzerland, France, UK before moving to the US. He retired from the business as President of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts after 30 years with the company having opened the company’s first newly built hotel in Washington DC in 1979 and also serving as president of Regent Hotels International in Hong Kong for 6 years which Four Seasons had purchased in 1992.
He is currently on the board of three companies , on the board of the Hotel School of the University of Houston, Texas and is currently chairman of an upstart internet company, wahanda.com, based in London. Wolf has been on the boards of the Houston Grand Opera and the Canadian Opera and a number of charity organizations over the years. He has lectured extensively at hotel schools around the world including Cornell, Essec ( Paris), Rice graduate School , Houston, University of Boston, Heidelberg , Florida University and more.
Hengst received an honorary doctorate in Hotel Business Administration from Johnson and Wales University in 2007 and has been selected to be commencement speaker for the 2008 class of MBA graduates at Pepperdine University where he will receive an honorary doctorate of law later this year.
Dr. John de Jong has been Vice President, Test Development at Pearson Language Tests since 2006. John graduated in General Linguistics, French and English languages from Leiden University and obtained a Ph.D. in Educational Measurement from Twente University. He has published numerous articles and books on language acquisition and assessment and on educational measurement. He has specialised in empirical scaling of language proficiency and promotes the development of internationally standardised reporting scales of language proficiency. He was involved from the start in developing the Common European Framework for Languages.