Adrianna Kezar

Dr. Adrianna Kezar, Professor for Higher Education, University of Southern California and Co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education. Kezar holds a Ph.D. 1996 and M.A. 1992 in higher education administration from the University of Michigan and a B.A. 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the faculty at USC in 2003. 

Dr. Kezar is a national expert of change and leadership and her research agenda explores the change process in higher education institutions and the role of leadership in creating change. Dr. Kezar is also a well-known qualitative researcher and has written several texts and articles about ways to improve qualitative research in education.  Kezar is well published with 14 books, over 75 journal articles, and over a hundred book chapters and reports. In 2011, she had two new books: Recognizing and Serving Low Income Students (Routledge, 2011) and Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership (Stanford Press, 2011). Other recent previous books include: Understanding the new majority of non-tenure track faculty (Jossey Bass, 2010), Organizing for collaboration (Jossey Bass, 2009), Rethinking leadership practices in a complex, multicultural and global world (Stylus Press, 2009), Rethinking the “L” Word in Higher Education: The Revolution of Research on Leadership (Jossey Bass, 2006),

Higher Education for the Public Good (Jossey Bass , 2005).  She has acquired over $6 million dollars in grant funding and has worked on grant-funded projects exceeding $12 million dollars on a variety of projects to fundamentally improve higher education, including a recent grant from the National Science Foundation to study networks formed to work with faculty in STEM to improve undergraduate education.