Susan Gardner

Susan K. Gardner, Ph.D. (she/her) is Dean of the College of Education at Oregon State University and professor of Adult and Higher Education. She began her faculty career at Louisiana State University during 2005-2007 and moved to UMaine in 2007. There, she earned early tenure in 2010 and was promoted to professor in 2015. In her career she has served as Director of a $3.3M National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant on faculty recruitment, retention, and advancement; Director of UMaine’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; Director of the Rising Tide Center focused on equity and inclusion; Associate Dean of Accreditation and Graduate Affairs and Interim Dean in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Maine. Susan comes to the field of education with a wide variety of experiences. As a first-generation college student, she graduated with her bachelor’s degree in education and Spanish from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1996. She then worked as a high school Spanish teacher in Wisconsin while earning her master’s degree part-time in education from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. In 2001, she moved to Washington to begin work as a student affairs administrator at Washington State University, where she simultaneously completed her Ph.D. in Higher Education in 2005. In all of these experiences, Susan maintained a strong focus on equity and inclusion in education. Dr. Gardner’s scholarship focuses on the intersections of individual success within organizational environments of higher education institutions. To date, this focus has lent itself to over 60 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and books on doctoral student socialization and development, interdisciplinarity, as well as on the topic of the retention and advancement of women faculty. In these areas, Susan has also served as PI, Co-PI, and major personnel on grants from the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation totaling nearly $24 million. Susan lives with her partner, two daughters, their poorly behaved dog, and their extremely patient cat in Corvallis, Oregon.