I'm Daniel Zummo. For six years I served as the senior academic employee-relations entity at the medical school of an R1 research university, first as Director of Academic Employee Relations and then as Chief Resolution Officer, advising the Executive Vice Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor of Health Sciences on the people problems of a division spanning more than a thousand academic employees within thirty-plus departments.
The work there was the unglamorous middle of academic leadership: confidential interviews when a department had stopped functioning, mediation between chairs and long-tenured faculty, grievance procedures that had outlived their original dispute, climate concerns that needed an outside reading before anyone decided whether a formal process was warranted. I led workplace investigations across more than twenty departments (whistleblower, discrimination, harassment, civil rights), redesigned the employee-relations workflow to cut investigation timelines by roughly thirty percent, and identified the recurring themes that translate individual cases into the policy and culture work an institution can actually act on.
Before the medical school, I worked the same problems from a different angle. I served as chief negotiator for a 750-employee K–12 district, leading multi-year collective bargaining across several union contracts and a complex multi-site restructuring. Before that, I represented school employees themselves at the bargaining table as a labor-relations representative, resolving grievances and drafting contract language on behalf of the workforce rather than the institution. Working both sides taught me the same lesson twice: most academic-employment problems are not lawsuits in disguise. They are conversations that stopped happening, paper trails nobody re-read, and norms that drifted further from the handbook than anyone noticed.
The legal training behind all of this is a JD and an LLM with a focus on international and multi-jurisdictional frameworks. That second degree is less of a thumb on the scale for any particular employment-law question and more of a habit of mind: when an institution operates across systems with different rules and norms, the work is to read the rules carefully and translate between them. That habit transfers cleanly from treaties to tenure codes.
I started Faculty Focused Solutions in early 2025 because most of the consulting available to academic leaders comes from one of two places. Large firms arrive with a corporate playbook that misreads tenure, faculty governance, and peer review in subtle, expensive ways. Solo coaches specialize in development but have not sat through a grievance. The institutions I work with want a third option: someone who can hold a confidential coaching session in the morning, walk through a policy interpretation in the afternoon, and write the memo that evening, without missing the register on any of them.
The practice splits its time between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Leuven, Belgium, working with US, European, and international institutions. Sessions are virtual by default; on-site engagements are scoped one at a time. I hold a working knowledge of US higher-education employment law and am building familiarity with Belgian and EU labour and social-dialogue frameworks for European engagements.