Experienced Academic Administrator
A nationally recognized expert on matters of research integrity, whistleblowing, ethics, and professionalism, C. K. Gunsalus is the Director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics, Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory. Gunsalus is the PI for the centerpiece project of NCPRE, a national online ethics resource center funded by the National Science Foundation in a $1.5M Cooperative Agreement. She has been on the faculty of the colleges of Business, Law, and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and served as Special Counsel in the Office of University Counsel. In the College of Business, she currently teaches Leadership and Ethics in the MBA program and is the director of the required Professional Responsibility course for all undergraduates in the college. She was a member of the faculty of the Medical Humanities/Social Sciences program in the College of Medicine, where she taught communication, conflict resolution skills and ethics. Her professional interests include ethics, with an emphasis on research and organizational issues, communication and conflict resolution.
Previously, she served for many years as an Associate Provost, where she was responsible for a range of academic policy and administrative duties, including department head training/support and academic policy interpretations and revision. During that time, she was known as the "department of yucky problems," with duties encompassing oversight of the discrimination and harassment grievance procedure, problem personnel cases and membership on the workplace violence team. Before that, her experience at the University included technology transfer, management of conflicts of interest, human subject protection, and long-term service as the campus Research Standards Officer with responsibility for responding to allegations of professional misconduct by faculty and students.
A licensed attorney, Ms. Gunsalus graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Illinois College of Law and as an AB with Distinction in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was appointed in 2012 to the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Responsible Science and previously served on the Committee on Research Integrity of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable Ad Hoc Group on Conflict of Interest. She was a member of the United States Commission on Research Integrity and served for four years as chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility; she now serves as a Member of the Council of Delegates of the AAAS. In 2004, she was elected a Fellow of the AAAS in recognition of her “sustained contributions to the national debate over improving the practical handling of ethical, legal, professional and administrative issues as they affect scientific research.” She has served on the Illinois Supreme Court’s Commission on Professionalism since 2005. In her spare time, Ms. Gunsalus also served 12 years on the Urbana Board of Education (school board), eight of those years as its President.
