Dr. Meredith L. Mountford

Meredith Mountford, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University in the Department of Educational Leadership and Research Methodology. She is also the Director of the UCEA Center for Research on District Governance as well as Past-President of AERA’s Research on the Superintendency. Dr. Mountford researches school boards, superintendents, educational policy, and gender. She has multiple publications in these areas as well as research on educational leadership preparation programs. Meredith consults with school board/superintendent teams all over the country on how to flatten team hierarchies and lessen the burden and of power and ego around superintendent/school board decision-making dynamics. She spent over 15 years in school districts in Wisconsin as a teacher, principal, and a district superintendent. She earned her Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and took her first Assistant Professor job at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2001. Meredith moved to Florida Atlantic University in 2005 and is currently a tenured Associate Professor who teaches Ethics and Policy Alternatives, Organizational Analysis, and Advanced Qualitative Methods to Ph.D. candidates. She has chaired over 20 dissertations; several of which have won awards at AERA or UCEA. She continues to be heavily involved in governance and leadership at FAU by serving as the Faculty Assembly President for the College of Education multiple times, she serves as a member of the steering committee for the University Faculty Senate and as a member of the UFF-FAU’s grievance and bargaining committees and is Past President of UFF-FAU. Her zealous to remain involved in university governance and to assume leadership positions is to continually improve her leadership skills in practice in an effort to continually improve her research on leadership and governance.