NEA President's Corner

[President's Biography] [President's Vision] [Board of Directors] [Past Presidents] [Elections] [Bylaws]

Sheila Ards, Ph.D., NEA President

Sheila Ards, Associate Vice President for Community Partnerships and Development at the University of Minnesota, is responsible for university-wide initiatives related to student affairs, multicultural affairs and community partnerships.

She is the immediate past Vice President for Community Development at Benedict College and the first director of the Center of Excellence for Community Development at Benedict. While in South Carolina, she played a prominent leadership role at the state, national, and local levels on issues relevant to problems confronting low-income and minority populations.

She has a Ph.D. in public policy and a master’s degree in public management from Carnegie-Mellon University. She did her undergraduate training in business at the University of Texas in Austin.

Dr. Ards’ research focuses on child abuse and neglect, family policy, welfare policy and redistricting. She has served as principal investigator on grants from the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect, the Urban League, and the NAACP-Legal Defense Fund. She was a research scholar at the Urban Institute, where she examined reporting patterns of child abuse and the societal cost of drug-abusing mothers.

She is a past President of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) and has served on the policy councils of the Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM) and Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA).