Adrianna Kezar’s research focuses on creating change in higher education, namely helping campuses and their stakeholders in successfully undergoing change processes. She also develops research on the important role of leadership in facilitating change.  She has explored in particular changes in support of student success, faculty, and diversity and equity. And she has explored how governance can also facilitate change through the inclusion of more voices in the change process. 

Research Projects

The purpose of the Pullias Center’s Faculty, Academic Careers and Environments (FACE) project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is to understand who faculty are, what their academic careers look like, and how the environments in which they work shape their ability to thrive as instructors, researchers and/or public scholars in the community.



Scaling Support for Contingent STEM Faculty through Learning Communities and Design Teams is a project that aims to help campus teams provide support, particularly related to professional development, to aid the increasing number of non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) who lack the institutional support to provide a quality learning environment for students in STEM.



​The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success is dedicated to enhancing awareness about the changing faculty trends using research and data to better support faculty off the tenure track and to help create new faculty models to support higher education institutions in the future.

The PASS Project, also known as the Thompson Scholars Learning Communities (TSLC) Study is a project that seeks to explore, document and better understand whether a comprehensive college transition program at three University of Nebraska campuses, translates into greater student success.

Achieving Scale for STEM Reform: Studying and Enhancing Undergraduate STEM Networks was a study to examine the development, design and outcomes of four STEM communities of practice in order to better understand their roles in scaling STEM education reform.

Scaling STEM Reform is a study that examines the role a national organization can play in making large-scale improvements in the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate STEM teaching and learning.

The California State University STEM Collaboratives is a project designed to provide immersive educational experiences to incoming STEM students on eight CSU campuses, with the goal to improve persistence and close achievement gaps. The Pullias Center worked with the CSU to examine the impact of this project on first-year student success in STEM education.