Prioritizing Health, Safety & Security: Hosting American Students - Speaker Bios

Andrea Bordeau currently serves as Global Safety and Security Manager at Vanderbilt University located in Nashville, Tennessee. At Vanderbilt, Andrea supports the entire traveling community through pre-departure training, risk assessment, and 24/7 crisis management.

With over 13 years of experience in the field of international education and student support, Andrea is deeply committed to enhancing student mobility through a focus on health, safety, and security. Andrea has led international workshops and webinars on topics such as risk mitigation, crisis communication, and supporting student mental health and well-being. As the foundation for successful global engagement, Andrea advocates for a direct and holistic approach in supporting travel in academia.

Prior to joining Vanderbilt, Andrea served as the Assistant Director for International Health and Safety at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has recently contributed to the creation of The Forum on Education Abroad’s Guidelines for Conducting Study Abroad during COVID-19. Andrea also serves as President of the international peer network Pulse: International Health and Safety Professionals in Higher Education, Inc., a position she has held since 2018. She has visited over 65 countries and has competency in Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish. Andrea has participated in training with FEMA, the United States Foreign Service Institute, and Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) through the U.S. Department of State. Andrea completed her graduate work in the fields of Middle East History and Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel and African Studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Heidi Manley is the Chief of USA Study Abroad, part of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), serving as the lead for American student mobility within the State Department.

She oversees two of the Department’s leading programs to support American students, the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program and the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program, which she launched in 2006. Heidi also has the lead for creating and overseeing a number of capacity-building initiatives to increase and diversify American student mobility, including the Capacity Building Program for U.S. Study Abroad for accredited U.S. higher education institutions, also known as the IDEAS Program, and Study Abroad Engagement Grants for U.S. Embassies and Fulbright Commissions worldwide. Heidi previously served as the Deputy Director of the Office of Global Educational Programs and in the Office of Academic Exchange Programs, where she worked on a number of initiatives under the Fulbright Program.

Terence Miller is Senior International Officer (SIO) at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In that capacity he oversees recruitment, admission and legal immigrant advising for all undergraduate students; legal immigrant advising for international graduate students; English as a Second Language Program; Education Abroad including risk management as well as 92 strategic international partnerships.

He has twenty-three years of international higher education experience working as the Director of Overseas Programs and Partnerships in University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for International Education and as Director for International and Intercultural Education at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He received his Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in Peace Studies and Government from Manhattan College in Riverdale, Bronx. He is an attorney receiving his Juris Doctorate from St. John’s University in New York City. He was a criminal defense attorney in Brooklyn, N.Y., a human rights attorney in Chile and director of an international public policy office in Washington, D.C.

He is Legal Advisor and ex officio Board member for the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA). He co-authored with Rajika Bhandari “Harnessing Data to Lead Internationalization” a chapter in Leading Internationalization: A Handbook for International Education Leaders (Stylus Publications, 2018). He has presented at AIEA, NAFSA, FORUM, APAIE and EAIE conferences.  

Terhi Mölsä is CEO, since 2016, of the Fulbright Finland Foundation -- a Helsinki-based, private, not-for-profit organization that collaborates with a range of government, foundation, university and corporate partners on both sides of the Atlantic to design and manage study and research scholarships, leadership development programs and internationalization services. With a life-long passion for diplomacy through education, science, and the arts, she draws on 35 years of experience in higher education internationalization and exchanges. She began her career working at the Office of Academic and International Affairs at Tampere University, Finland, where she helped launch the university’s first European mobility programs, and worked on Ministry of Education funded national initiatives. Preceding her current position she served most recently as the Executive Director of the Finland-U.S. Educational Exchange Commission.

Terhi Mölsä has worked internationally as a consultant, trainer, and curriculum developer on strategic leadership in international education, and as an author, most recently contributing to the SAGE Encyclopedia of Higher Education (2020). She has served in professional leadership positions, among others in NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and is currently Member of the Advisory Council of the John Morton Center for North American Studies, and Board Member of ISEP. She holds an M.Soc.Sc. in International Relations and a B.A. in Russian from Tampere University, and certificates from, among others, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government Executive Education.

Leasa Weimer is the Assistant Director of Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives for the Fulbright Finland Foundation in Helsinki. In addition, she’s a Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä and a member of the Finnish national team conducting an international comparative study with IIEP-UNESCO on flexible learning pathways.

Weimer has over 20 years of experience as a scholar/practitioner in international higher education, previously she served as Knowledge Development Adviser for the European Association in International Education and president of the global Erasmus Mundus Student and Alumni Association. Bridging research with practice, she has edited several international volumes, authored journal articles, book chapters, and commissioned policy papers considering the intersection of the political economy, policies, and the implementation of international higher education.

Weimer holds a PhD in higher education from the University of Georgia, U.S. and an Erasmus Mundus joint master’s degree in European higher education from the University of Oslo, Norway; University of Tampere, Finland; and University of Aveiro, Portugal and a Bachelor's double degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder, U.S.