Dr. Carmen Foster, Ed.D.

Carmen F. Foster, EdD, is an inclusive leader with more than three decades of service in the government, higher education, and nonprofit sectors. Dr. Foster provides executive coaching for senior executives in federal agencies and, most recently, served as a faculty member for the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the great-great-granddaughter of an enslaved nurse and healer from the American South.

Since 1991, she has served as Director of Master's Program in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, Executive Director at the University of Richmond's Jepson School of Leadership Studies, and Executive Director of the Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University.

During her tenure at the Kennedy School, she received a Kellogg National Leadership Fellow grant for a self-designed study throughout Ghana, South Africa, China, and Brazil to investigate the global nexus of leadership, spirituality, and healing for women and communities of color.

Carmen received her doctor of education degree from the University of Virginia and holds additional degrees from Harvard University, Clarion University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She has also completed Harvard's Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government, the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program with Jon Kabat-Zinn, and is a certified administrator for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

While she has significant expertise in adaptive leadership, organizational analysis, and social capital development, her historical scholarship researches the dynamics of race and education, and the use of genealogy for healing.