About

Susan Elrod is a nationally recognized scholar, educator, and practitioner whose work converges at the intersection of higher education leadership, systemic change, and shared governance. As a consultant and thought partner, she brings a career of higher education leadership that reflects her experiences as a faculty member, administrator, national leader, and scholar.

Elrod’s scholarly contributions include more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and books on topics ranging from genetics and undergraduate STEM education to systemic change and shared leadership. She is co-author of the Change Leadership Toolkit (2025), an evidence-based framework and step-by-step guide for leading systemic change in higher education, and co-author of Shared Leadership in Higher Education (2021). Her work has appeared in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, The Review of Higher Education, Academic Leader, and other leading publications. Over the past decade, she has worked with hundreds of colleges and universities across the spectrum of institutional types in the US, Canada and abroad. Elrod has also provided her organizational transformation, governance, and leadership development expertise to dozens of national associations, such as AAAS, AAU, AASCU, APLU, BHEF, CCA, UIA, UIIN, and accreditors including HLC, NWCCU and WASC. She is a regular conference session presenter and keynote speaker, serves on the editorial board of Change magazine and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a distinction recognizing her sustained contributions to STEM higher education. She and her colleagues have secured millions in federal and philanthropic funding from the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others.

Her administrative career reflects the same commitment to evidence-based, systemic, and collaborative approaches. She served as the sixth Chancellor of Indiana University South Bend, as Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, as Interim Provost at California State University, Chico, and as Dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at California State University, Fresno where she led initiatives resulting in strategic transformation, student success, fiscal sustainability, and community partnerships using a shared leadership approach across institutions of varying size, mission, and context. Earlier in her career, she was an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow at Colorado College and served as Executive Director of Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) at the Association of American Colleges & Universities, where she led multi-campus national initiatives in undergraduate STEM education reform funded by the U.S. Department of Education and major foundations. She is a co-founder of CRUSE, the Coalition for Reform in Undergraduate STEM Education, a consortium of national associations and societies. She served on the board of HERS and is now on the board of Campus Compact.

Professional Credentials

Elrod holds a PhD in Genetics from the University of California, Davis and a BS in Biological Sciences from California State University, Chico where she also served as President of the Associated Students, Inc. (ASI). She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Novozymes, Inc. in Davis, CA.