Mushtaq Gunja serves as executive director of the Carnegie Classification systems and senior vice president at ACE, where he is in charge of running and reimagining the Carnegie framework.

Prior to joining ACE, Gunja served as assistant dean in academic affairs at Georgetown University ​Law Center (DC), where he was in charge of academic policies for the law school, including accreditation, teaching methods, and new programs related to increased educational outcomes. He also serves as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law and previously taught at the University of Maryland School of Law and Washington Adventist University.

Gunja served as the chief of staff to the under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education under President Obama. In this position, he provided strategic advice to the under secretary in the development and implementation of policies across higher education, including improving access and affordability, highlighting promising practices to foster completion, encouraging increased innovation, improving the borrower experience for students with federal loans, and ensuring fair treatment for all students of higher education. He also served in the Obama administration as deputy associate White House counsel with responsibilities for vetting and confirming the president’s political appointees. Before moving to Washington, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore, where he prosecuted a variety of cases, including violent crime, racketeering offenses, drug conspiracies, and financial fraud. His work on the opioid crisis, prescription overdose deaths, and doctors’ prescribing habits earned him three Drug Enforcement Administration awards.

Gunja graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School (MA) and magna cum laude and with honors from Brown University (RI) with a B.A. in political science and diplomatic history.​​​​​​