We suppose you know Don as well as we do and probably for a longer period of time. Don joined BYU directly from the World Bank and was appointed initially as the Dean of International Studies and Director of the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. He served the normal five-year term there before taking up his professorship in the School of Education. Before joining School of Education, Don spent most of 2002 in Vietnam as a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar.

Don has enjoyed a career in both the hallowed halls of academia and in the world of development assistance. He spent eleven years at the World Bank stationed in Washington, D.C., except for the final two years when he was seconded to a USAID-funded project in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. For a person who began his student years in Latin American Studies and fluent in Portuguese from a two and one half year Latter-day Saint mission to Brazil, he has since lived for substantial periods in a range of countries in Africa, East Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Don is married to Ellen Sorensen, and they are parents of five daughters and two sons and are the proud grandparents of thirteen. Sadly for Don and Ellen, the progeny are scattered far and wide in England, Switzerland, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah, Washington State, and California.

The Holsinger family were German immigrants to the U.S. in the late 1900s. Conservative Baptists (Old Order Brethren), they were by profession farmers and ministers of religion. They settled in Indiana but when Don's grandfather died his grandmother and seven children went west to Idaho where his grandmother was employed as Matron of Women at a small Brethren school. Don's father and mother-to-be met in Albion Normal School where each was preparing to become a schoolteacher. His mother, Veese Hatch, was a devout Latter-day Saint and, as often happens, married despite protests from both families. Mothers typically win in these cases, and his father eventually converted to Mormonism and Don and his six brothers and sisters were all raised in that faith.

Don was born in May 1942 in Ogden, Utah. His father, a staunch pacifist, had been assigned to civilian duty at Hill Air Force base. Study, hard work, cars and wrestling were hallmarks of Don's growing years. Despite the considerable international dimension that would come to characterize his later life, by the time he was sent to Brazil at the age of nineteen he had only been out of the state of Idaho twice, once to the Oregon coast and once to Utah. Needless to say, the two and one half year experience in Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities had a dramatic and lasting impact on Don and helped form his view of his own life and that of a larger world that he had a growing appetite to understand.

Following his mission to Brazil, Don enrolled at Brigham Young University, where he received a BA in Hispanic American Studies. Then he was off to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for four years, during which time he earned an MA in Portuguese and an MS in Rural Sociology. In his final year at Madison, Don, against the advice of his sociology advisors took a course in Comparative Education from Professor Erwin Epstein. That course led Don to earn a PhD in education and development from Stanford University, a program then called SIDEC. He studied under Professor Alex Inkeles and wrote his dissertation on the impact of schooling on a cluster of attitudes and values that Inkeles had labeled psychological modernity.

With the 2004 conference behind him, Don looks forward to this year as our new president and returning to Stanford for the 2005 conference.