Martha Casazza, Ed.D.

Martha Casazza, Ed.D.
Vice President of Academic Affairs

Martha E. Casazza is the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Adler School of Professional Psychology. Dr. Casazza's primary area of interest focuses on access to education for traditionally underserved populations. She has been in the field of higher education for over twenty years, both as a faculty member and administrator. Most of her professional career has been in Chicago, but she also lived in Poland, where she consulted on faculty development, and South Africa, where she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Port Elizabeth.

She is a regular speaker and contributor to professional journals and was one of the first to call for a theoretical foundation for the field of developmental education in her Journal of Developmental Education article, Strengthening Practice with Theory. Furthermore, Dr. Casazza has coauthored two books with Dr. Sharon Silverman: Learning Assistance and Developmental Education: A Guide for Effective Practice (1996) and Learning and Development (2000). Her most recent publication entitled Access, Opportunity, and Success: Keeping the Promise of Higher Education was published in 2006. She received the Hunter R. Boylan Outstanding Research/Publication Award in 2004, and is a Founding Fellow of the American Council of Developmental Education Associations.

She has served as President of the National College Learning Center Association, President of the National Association for Developmental Education, Coeditor of the Learning Assistance Review, and Coeditor for the National Association for Developmental Education Newsletter. She is currently on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Developmental Education as well as the Advisory Boards for the Center for Research on Developmental Education and Urban Literacy, the Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning, and Crossing Borders.

Her current activities include serving as the President of the Illinois Network of Women in Higher Education, an affiliate of the American Council of Education, and engaging in community-based research through an oral history project on the Latino communities of the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods.