Dr. Adrianna Kezar, director of USC’s Pullias Center for Higher Education and the Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education at the Rossier School of Education, has been awarded the prestigious Exemplary Research award for 2024 from the American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Division J.
The Award is bestowed annually to recognize outstanding research by an esteemed colleague and scholar who demonstrates an unusually high level of accomplishment and whose published research has made outstanding contributions to knowledge and understanding the field of higher education.
“I am very honored and humbled by this award. To have my research acknowledged in this manner is really exciting. I want to thank my many research collaborators and my Pullias center and Rossier colleagues for their support,” noted Kezar.
This is not the first award for Dr. Kezar. She is an AERA Fellow, and has received several national awards including the ASHE research award, ASHE leadership award, and ACE leadership award. Dr. Kezar’s research focuses on change management and leadership, institutional culture, student success, contingent, or VITAL faculty and changing faculty trends, shared governance in higher education and STEM reform. Her work on change and leadership has guided the work of foundations and government agencies. Additionally, her equity and student success work have both helped create more systemic solutions to these on-going challenges, moving toward real resolution. Campuses across the country credit her research for the improved working conditions for contingent/VITAL track faculty.
She is the Executive Editor of Change magazine and director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, a multi-year partnership with the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) focused on improving the life of faculty off the tenure track. Kezar also currently serves as Principal Investigator for a number of grant-funded projects, including the Shared Equity Leadership project, Change Leadership Toolkit for Advancing Systemic Change, the Faculty, Academic Careers and Environments survey, and, serves on several other key Pullias Center projects such as the Promoting At-student Success (PASS) project.
Kezar is well published with 26 books/monographs, more than 100 journal articles, and over a hundred book chapters and reports. She has acquired over $22 million dollars in grant funding and has worked on grant-funded projects exceeding $35 million dollars on a variety of projects to fundamentally improve higher education. Her most recent books include Higher Education Leadership and Creating a Campus-wide Culture of Student Success.
AERA will confer the Award at its annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA on April 13, 2024.
