Student leadership development, college student generational cohorts, leadership and futures issues in student affairs administration.

Susan R. Komives is Professor Emerita in the Student Affairs Graduate Program at the University of Maryland College Park where she taught until 2012. She is past president of the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) and of the American College Personnel Association (ACPA). She served as Vice President of both Stephens College and the University of Tampa.
She is the co-author or co-editor of 14 books or monographs including Student Services, Exploring Leadership, Leadership for A Better World, Facilitating the Social Change Model, Handbook for Student Leadership Development, Management and Leadership Issues for a New Century, How Academic Disciplines Approach Leadership Development, Cross Border Enhancement for Learning and Development, and A Research Agenda for Leadership Learning and Developing Through Higher Education. Four of her books have been translated into Japanese and Chinese. She has given over 500 keynote speeches.

She was a member of the teams that wrote Learning Reconsidered and the ensemble that developed the widely-used Social Change Model of Leadership Development. In 2014, she became the founding executive editor of the New Directions for Student Leadership series, a quarterly monograph from Jossey-Bass/Wiley publishers.

She was a founding co-principal investigator of the international Multi-institutional Study of Leadership and PI for the widely used Leadership Identity Development project. She is founder of the National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs. She was chair of the ACPA Senior Scholars, a senior scholar with the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Leadership Association. She was a NASPA Faculty Fellow and a faculty member for numerous NASPA mid-managers institutes and the Stevens SSAO Institute. She has consulted in leadership or student affairs in Canada, China, Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, and Qatar.

She is the 2011 recipient of the University of Maryland Board of Regent’s Award for Faculty Teaching and the NASPA Shaffer Award for Academic Excellence as a graduate faculty member along with being a NASPA Pillar of the Profession. She is a recipient of both the ACPA and NASPA outstanding research and scholarship awards. She is the 2019 recipient of the NASPA John S. Blackburn Distinguished Pillar of the Profession Award, the 2012 recipient of the ACPA Life-Time Achievement Award, and the 2013 Leadership and Service Award from the Association of Leadership Educators. She was honored with the Life-time Legacy Achievement Award in 2022 by the International Leadership Association. She has received the distinguished alumni award from her alma maters Florida State University and the University of Tennessee; her national sorority, Delta Delta Delta; and the distinguished national alumni award from both Mortar Board and Omicron Delta Kappa.

Her bachelor of science degree is in mathematics minoring in chemistry from Florida State University; her masters of science is in higher education/student affairs from Florida State University; her doctorate is in educational leadership from the University of Tennessee. She and her photographer husband, Ralph, live near Tampa Florida and are proud of their two children and three amazing grandchildren.