Susan L. Carlson

Professional Bio:

As Associate Provost, Dr. Carlson has led efforts to enhance the academic environment for Iowa State faculty. Primary accomplishments include new policies for promotion and tenure, new programs for flexible faculty careers and partner accommodation, and new approaches to part-time appointments for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty. She currently serves as the PI for an NSF-funded ADVANCE Program to increase the diversity of STEM faculty. She also coordinates faculty recruitment and retention, mentoring and new faculty orientation, leadership training for department chairs, and university awards. She chairs the Advisory Committee on Diversity Program Planning and Coordination, the body charged with ensuring a vigorous and diverse institutional community. She is responsible for the work of the University Committee on Women, the Women’s Leadership Consortium, the Keeping our Faculties of Color Leadership Team, the Council of College Diversity Committee Chairs, the Diversity Grants Program, the Martin Luther King Jr. Planning Committee, and the Iowa Women’s Leadership Summit. She is regularly involved in college-level planning, she has managed the searches for three deans, and she led the effort to combine the Colleges of Education and Family and Consumer Sciences into the new College of Human Sciences. She has also coordinated strategic planning for faculty and diversity issues.

She is the founding President of the Iowa Network for Women in Higher Education and serves on the national board of directors for the Office of Women in Higher Education, a division of the American Council on Education.