Meet Basia Skudrzyk
Basia Skudrzyk is a builder of programs, bridges, and, most of all, people. Raised in a Polish immigrant family where hospitality and resilience were everyday disciplines, she began her career managing high-stakes events at the Chase Park Plaza. Those eight formative years offered a front-row view of how leaders shape culture and outcomes, insights she later carried into higher education, workforce development, and systems change.
At Washington University School of Medicine, Basia helped design and launch a Global Health Scholars program that operated across seven international sites, including St. Louis. The program’s collaborative spirit produced one unforgettable project: coordinating students from engineering, architecture, public health, and medicine to refurbish an ambulance that now serves indigenous women in Guatemala.
A personal turning point drew Basia into the reentry space, where she applied her operational acumen to serve people often overlooked by traditional systems. “I decided to focus my life into lifting people’s voices who are typically diminished or not heard.” At St. Patrick Center, Basia built a workforce pathway with housing and transportation support, then secured a $5M NSF Bridges to Baccalaureate grant with Howard University and Baltimore City Community College—placing formerly incarcerated scholars on a fully funded two-year-plus-two-year journey to a bachelor’s degree, anchored by research mentorship and a strong support network.
Basia’s versatility shows up in unusual places. NASA invited her to help translate the needs of farmers into research priorities, connecting satellite data and AI models to practical decisions about planting and yield. She describes her role with characteristic clarity and humor: “I can translate the gibberish into information we can actually use,” she says. Her gift of turning complex inputs into workable action framed her doctoral research at UMSL in supply chain management and analytics. Her dissertation examines how geopolitical conflict disrupts food systems in Poland and how stakeholders build resilience under shock, insights that travel well beyond agriculture to any sector managing uncertainty. She graduated in May of 2026 with her doctorate in Business Administration from UMSL with a focus on supply chain management and will be starting a new role as Data Governance Director at Lindenwood University.
Her leadership is also shaped by her family’s story of immigration and the hard work that followed. That work ethic also informs her community work: organizing cultural events through the Polish American Congress and Polish American Culture Society; engaging with the Petey Greene Program and Keyway to support justice-impacted students by building pipelines to sustainable workforce opportunities; and sustaining intergenerational connection at home with a beloved weekly Rummikub night, which started to keep her father’s mind active during Alzheimer’s, and now a tradition kept alive in his honor
Beyond the office, Basia is a gardener and cook, a traveler and reader (she recommends All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr), and a proud mom to two “super badass” daughters—one a D2 soccer player at the University of Illinois Springfield, the other a lacrosse player at St. Joseph’s Academy. Her professional center of gravity remains constant: systems change and workforce development that open doors for people, then surround them with the right tools to walk through.