While her personal and professional roots run deep in upstate New York, Francesca Cichello, the executive director of International Education at SUNY Empire, brings a lifetime of intercultural experience to her position. She oversees education services for students in Albania, the Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Greece, Lebanon and Turkey – from degree planning to designing and delivering online courses.

Cichello grew up the daughter of two high-school language teachers in a trilingual household, where they communicated in Italian, Spanish and English. She was surrounded by a multicultural richness that sparked her innate understanding of, and fascination with, “a wide swath of people.”

Now, she says, “You can’t say you’ve really educated a person who hasn’t been prepared for exposure to people with different values and outlooks, speaking a different language in a different time zone.” Thus, her position at SUNY Empire is a perfect match. The college is the beneficiary of her up-close-and-personal commitment and, in her words, “zest for internationalization.”

Cichello’s responsibilities at the college include helping to develop new and innovative international programs and partnerships, creating collaborative opportunities for faculty and academic leadership to internationalize the curriculum, expanding study abroad tours and study opportunities tailored for working adult learners, fostering international faculty exchange, building international enrollments, engaging international alumni and more.

Cichello also teaches Italian language and culture to adults through the college’s Academy for Lifelong Learning. “I love being in the classroom,” she says, explaining that after graduating from Skidmore she received a Master of Teaching from Union College and spent one gratifying year as a high-school teacher. “I think to be a good administrator, you have to stay in touch with students. I don’t want to get too far away from that. You’ve got to keep your feet in the classroom and on the ground. I find it energizing.”

Cichello, who has been at SUNY Empire since 2006, is especially intrigued by the potential for online international learning, observing that the approach offers access to students abroad, who, despite being great distances from each other, fully participate in classes, while not compromising the excitement of connecting with peers and instructors, or the quality of the course content. To this end, she leads the college’s efforts with the SUNY Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Network and serves on the founding advisory board for the SUNY-University of the West Indies Center for Leadership and Sustainable Development.

She has, herself, designed online courses; her familiarity with optimizing this format makes her a valuable resource to both faculty and students around the world.

“SUNY Empire views developing high-level international education as a priority,” Cichello says. “We understand the power and meaning of international education as transformative and extraordinary and that any real conversation about global high-level learning has to include international education as part of the discussion.”