Tuajuanda Jordan, Ph.D.
Immediate past HERS Board Chair
2000 HERS Leadership Institute Alumna
President
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
St. Mary’s City, MD
“To serve on a board focused on empowering women to develop their leadership skills is a privilege that has been bestowed upon me and I will not squander it. As a HERS Bryn Mawr 2000 participant, our motto was “Administration as a creative act.” I have come back to that motto time and time again as I’ve risen through the ranks. The HERS experience was transformative and I am honored to be in a position where I can work to ensure that it remains so for many years to come.”
Dr. Tuajuanda Jordan has served as St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s (SMCM) seventh president since July 2014. Under her leadership, the College continues to analyze and assess its programming to ensure that students are provided opportunities to be engaged, productive global citizens and leaders. Since joining the College, President Jordan has been widely recognized for her contributions to higher education and the larger community. Recently, she was named one of the Top 25 Women in Higher Education by the national magazine, Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
In addition to serving on numerous national panels and boards, she was recognized as a Black Leader in Education by the AFRO (2017), was named as one of Fisk University’s Talented Tenth (2016), Purdue University’s Distinguished Women Scholars (2015-16), and as an Influential Marylander by the Daily Record (2015). She received the Torchbearer Award (2014) from the National Coalition of Black Women, Baltimore Metropolitan Chapter and was inducted (2015) into the Zeta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society.
Prior to SMCM, Dr. Jordan served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and as a professor of chemistry at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. While there, she helped recruit an exceptional and diverse faculty, launched a center for entrepreneurship, and developed a campus-wide system to increase student persistence and graduation rates. While an associate dean and tenured faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences at Xavier University of Louisiana, she helped establish the center for undergraduate research and creativity. Dr. Jordan gained national prominence in the realm of science education with the creation of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science Education Alliance (SEA) program and the launch of its first initiative, the SEA Phage program, which engaged novice undergraduates in research in genomics and bioinformatics. This program has been implemented at more than 50 diverse institutions across the nation, impacted thousands of students and faculty, and resulted in numerous scientific and pedagogical publications. Dr. Jordan holds a B.S. in chemistry from Fisk University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Purdue University.
