Governance Board

Ryan Aasheim has served as Chief Business Development Officer for the Greater Fargo Moorhead Economic Development Corporation (GFMEDC) since 2019. He is responsible for leading the GFMEDC’s business development efforts including new primary-sector business attraction and existing business retention and expansion. This includes understanding and serving the needs of the more than 400 primary-sector businesses in the Greater Fargo Moorhead region. His experience working with AgTech companies, manufacturers, and innovators in agriculture, autonomous systems, bioscience, and adjacent industries puts him in a unique position to understand where partnerships may exist and how to bring together the right stakeholders to support multistakeholder opportunities. Since joining the EDC in 2019, Ryan has led or supported over 125 successful projects that have resulted in 2,350 direct new jobs and total of more than 5,000 jobs created, utilization or addition of over 3.75 million sqft or real estate, and nearly $1 billion of new capital investment by new and existing companies.

Ryan Aasheim
Chief Business Development Officer

Greater Fargo Moorhead EDC

Dr. Jenna Mueller serves as Executive Director of the FMWF Chamber Foundation, one of her first major achievements upon joining the Chamber was revitalizing our dormant foundation, which now addresses pressing workforce challenges. She quickly co-created a strategic plan that has moved the foundation into a prominent leadership position regionally and statewide. Under her leadership, the Chamber launched the Ignite program, a systematic approach to workforce that brings together a diverse array of partners from business, education, non-profit and government to collaborate on workforce solutions. Her efforts also resulted in securing a $9.62 million Good Jobs Challenge Grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

Jenna Currie-Mueller, Ph.D., Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce
Executive Director
The FMWF Chamber Foundation

Dr. Twyla Baker is an enrolled citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa & Arikara Nation and was born and raised on the rural Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in northwest North Dakota. Baker currently serves as the President of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College. Her work is highly focused on improving quality of life and access to education for Indigenous people across the U.S. She writes and has published her research, opinion, thought pieces, and creative works in scholarly journals and other publications.

Twyla Baker
President
Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College

Brian Carroll is results-driven leader with extensive experience and success in driving strategic and operational excellence. Brian spent 8 years as the Site Leader and Director of Advanced Engineering and Launch (AEL) at HERE Technologies and loves helping people plan, optimize, and launch new initiatives. He spent much of his career building high-performing teams in the location content industry, gaining experience in building operations in India, Mexico and Europe. While operations and project management are his primary job functions by day, Brian also enjoys spending time with his family and traveling to interesting places.

Brian Carroll
Chief Innovation Officer for Emerging Prairie
and co-founder of Grand Farm

Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald, PhD, is responsible for advancing and supporting research, creative activity, technology transfer, entrepreneurship and economic development activities for NDSU. In this role, Colleen leads the vision and executes the strategy to advance the research and innovation enterprise at NDSU, a land-grant and the state's only Carnegie R1 institution. NDSU reached a new milestone with $174.9 million in research expenditures in the most recent fiscal year (FY22), which places the institution among the top 100 public research universities according to the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development Survey (HERD)

Colleen brings an insightful eye and keen strategic awareness on how the distinctive strengths of an institution and region, like North Dakota State University and North Dakota, create opportunities for partnerships working towards a shared vision of a better future. Essential to this is being able to recognize and communicate the valuable and interwoven nature between the institutional mission, the region's unique resources, and the institution's regional and national significance, and how partnerships enhance meaningful and powerful alignment among those elements.

Her accomplishments as a scholar focused on supporting Native American language communities in their efforts to revitalize and document their languages. For those efforts, she was recognized as a Fellow of both the Linguistic Society of the America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Colleen Fitzgerald, PhD
Vice President for Research and Creative Activity

North Dakota State University (NDSU)