Maire Ford
Máire Ford, Ph.D., serves as Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development. In this role she supports the professional growth and success of faculty members at LMU through the Center for Faculty Development (CFD). This center focuses on three areas: teaching and learning, professional and leadership development, and scholarly and creative practice.
As Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development, her responsibilities include providing strategic direction for the CFD in a manner that supports LMU’s mission and strategic goals, creating and implementing faculty development programs in the three areas mentioned above, and facilitating events that encourage knowledge-sharing and community building for faculty across disciplines. Professor Ford is invested in promoting a sense of community and belonging amongst faculty while also providing them with opportunities to develop new skills in a supportive and inclusive environment.
AVP Ford joined the faculty at LMU in 2006 as a psychology professor. She teaches a variety of courses that fall under the broader umbrellas of social psychology and health psychology, and she also teaches a course on statistical methods. As a professor she works to cultivate knowledge and intellectual curiosity in her students and to provide them with the tools and motivation that they need to be lifelong learners. Ford is a recipient of the Fritz B. Burns Award for Excellence in Teaching.
AVP Ford’s primary research sits at the intersection of social psychology and health psychology. In her research lab she investigates the role of the self in shaping perceptions of events that occur in close interpersonal relationships and subsequent responses. Her primary focus is on how the self shapes health-related responses to events such as rejection, exclusion, and other threats to belonging. Additionally, she studies various ways of imparting resilience for those experiencing threats to belonging. AVP Ford also conducts research that contributes to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). She has an active research lab staffed by several excellent LMU undergraduate students. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
AVP Ford has served as the Associate Chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences, a member of Faculty Senate, and a member of several advisory boards for various programs and centers at LMU.