Prof. Rihab Khalifa
PhD, MSc, BSc
Commissioner Khalifa has nearly 20 years of academic and professional experience spanning international top ranked universities and business schools. Previously she was Acting Dean, as well as Vice Dean and Professor of Accounting at the College of Business and Economics (CBE) at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). She was also the founding Director of the Emirates Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (EILOA), setting in process major changes in learning outcomes practices for the country, region and internationally. A key strength of hers lies in the strategic alignment of organisational structures and processes.
She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester. Before her professorship at UAEU, she held positions at Manchester Business School, the London School of Economics, and Warwick Business School, UK. She has extensive experience in three key areas; higher education, governance and auditing, and leading strategic change.
Commissioner Khalifa is an internationally renowned expert in auditing and governance and has published research on a broad range of public and private sector governance issues, including the governance of academia, the UAE and UK audit profession, the governance of development NGOs through audit, new technologies and risk in financial audit, corporate governance research methodologies, the governance of local government, university governance and international accreditation schemes, and sociology of professions and gender. Her expertise in university governance practices, in particular, is evidenced by her ties with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the oldest international business school accreditation agency. She is the first female Arabic speaker to become a workshop trainer and business school mentor for AACSB. She is one of nine Steering Committee Members of the AACSB Women Administrators in Management Education group. Her scholarly work has appeared in leading accounting journals, including Accounting Organizations and Society (rated A* by ABDC list), Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal (A*), Critical Perspectives on Accounting (A), the European Accounting Review (A*), and Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management (A), and has been funded by leading research funding agencies, such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and various British professional accountancy bodies. Total grants amount to over $500,000. She is frequently asked to speak on questions of higher education, governance, auditing, gender-responsive budgeting, futures studies and, in particular, the futures of higher education and university governance in the context of economic development and the knowledge economy more broadly.