FEATURED SPEAKER

Brandon Busteed

Executive Director of Education and Workforce Development,
Gallup

Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Education and Workforce Development, leads Gallup’s education work. His career spans a wide range of important work in education as an educational entrepreneur, speaker, writer and university trustee. Brandon’s work integrates Gallup’s research and science on talent selection, strengths, engagement and well-being to improve student success, teacher effectiveness and educational outcomes. His mission is to create a national movement to measure the educational outcomes that matter most, connect education to jobs and job creation and promote a paradigm shift from knowledge mastery to emotional engagement in education.

With Brandon’s leadership, Gallup Education has released several ground-breaking Gallup studies. These includeState of America’s Schools: The Path to Winning Again in Education, which explores student and teacher engagement in public schools, and Great Jobs, Great Lives: The 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index Report, a comprehensive, nationally representative study of U.S. college graduates that focuses on their long-term outcomes in work and life.

Brandon has founded two companies and one nonprofit organization as a social entrepreneur. He is the founder and former CEO of Outside The Classroom, a company that pioneered adaptive online education in alcohol abuse prevention. A three-year, 30-school, national study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed that AlcoholEdu — the organization’s flagship alcohol-abuse prevention program — was effective in reducing binge drinking, drunk driving and sexual assaults. More than 5 million students have participated in the program. The company was acquired by EverFi in 2011.

An internationally known speaker and author on education policy, Brandon has written frequently for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Trusteeship Magazine, The Huffington Post, Fast Company and other publications. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today and on NPR and the NBC News “TODAY” show, among others.

Brandon received his bachelor’s degree in public policy from Duke University and an honorary doctorate from Augustana College. He is a trustee emeritus of Duke and has served on the Board of Visitors of the Sanford School of Public Policy. A former two-sport NCAA Division 1 athlete at Duke, Brandon continues to hone his competitive drive as an avid CrossFitter. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, with his wife, Deanna, and two children, Anabelle and Harrison.