Tay Keong Tan, Ph.D.

Tay Keong Tan is recently appointed Director of the Virginia Governor’s School for the Visual & Performing Art and Humanities. He is also currently serving as Director of Leadership Studies and International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Radford University. He teaches leadership, global issues, and public administration at RU. Dr. Tan’s research is focused on global sustainability; he is author and editor of five recent books on sustainable development and global corruption.

For more than a decade, Tay Keong worked in the fields of public governance, anti-corruption, and public management in two dozen countries, including Armenia, Bhutan, Bulgaria, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Lebanon, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. He served as the Chief of Staff of the Office of Internal Oversight Services of the United Nations, Executive Director of the Singapore International Foundation, and Assistant Superintendent in the Singapore Police Force.

Since arriving in Radford, he has undertaken problem-solving projects and consultancies for the City of Galax Volunteer Fire and Rescue, Radford-Fairlawn Daily Bread, Community Housing Partners, Blue Mountain School, European Union and United Nations Development Program. He has been a faculty of the Governor’s School for the Humanities since 2016. He  teaches the highly-subscribed courses, “Mistakes Leaders Make,” “Emotional Literacy, Fluency, and Intelligence” and “Predictions, Prognoses, and Prophecies.”

In 2023, Tay Keong co-founded with a team of his students the Wicked Society of Radford University. The Society is a highly-decorated and prolific student organization; its founding members won nine international and local in the first year of its operation. For his work in mentoring student researchers in the creation of the Wicked Problems Toolkit, the United Nations PRME network of scholars, conferred on him the prestigious “Innovator’s Award” at its annual conference in Lisbon in 2023. That same year, he was also awarded the awarded Radford University’s Distinguished Creative Scholar Award.

Dr. Tan has a doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.