Shabnam Koirala-Azad, PhD,  is the first female dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, and in 2018, was recognized as one of the Most Influential Women in the Bay Area. Her leadership is informed by a strong background in educational research and scholarship. As a full professor in the School of Education she has continued to mentor and support students in their doctoral research, while contributing to infrastructure development in the School of Education.  For more than a decade as a faculty member in the School of Education and as department chair for the Department of International and Multicultural Education, she added a strong global education component to the curriculum and co-founded the first degree program in Human Rights Education in the United States.

As a critical scholar, she has made new conceptual and methodological contributions to the field of international and comparative education, migration, and diaspora studies. Specifically, her work with South Asian immigrant students and families brings a transnational lens to concepts of identity, belonging, citizenship and civic participation, disrupting misconceptions, and offering critical possibilities for grassroots collaboration across borders. As a mother-scholar, she contributes to scholarship that highlights ways in which mothering enriches careers in academia. Her current passion lies in forging new and humanizing methods and approaches to social science research by honoring lived experiences, utilizing radical imagination, and validating collective forms of knowledge generation through the School of Education’s Center for Humanizing Education and Research (C-HER), which launched under her leadership.

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