Heather Tarleton
Heather Tarleton, Ph.D., M.S., M.P.A.P., serves as Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professional Development. Her responsibilities include provision of support for full- and part-time faculty including professional development toward inclusive teaching, guidance for college leadership, department chairs and faculty candidates in the tenure and promotion review processes, and shared leadership around strategies for recruiting and retaining highly qualified and diverse full- and part-time faculty.
Professor Tarleton joined the faculty at LMU in 2012 after teaching as a non-tenure track faculty member and serving in administrative positions at UCLA. She is a molecular biologist and public health practitioner, teaching courses in chronic disease epidemiology, biopsychosocial determinants of health, and health services for communities that are frequently marginalized. Since wellbeing is a complex phenomenon, Professor Tarleton encourages her students to become sensitive to the diversity of needs, issues with access and availability of city and state services, and interpersonal communication to promote humanity and dignity. She also models for students the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to approach grand challenges in our society by partnering with faculty in communication studies, liberal arts, and the humanities to co-develop and co-instruct courses and fieldwork experiences.
Professor Tarleton’s research in cancer epidemiology has focused on health disparities and quality of life among multi-ethnic populations of cancer patients. She has worked in partnership with faculty and students in LMU’s Department of Marital and Family Therapy to promote art therapy as a sustainable and impactful treatment for both the mental and physical side effects of the cancer survivorship experience. As a faculty development practitioner, Professor Tarleton is invested in an expansion of focus on student-centered pedagogies and equitable learning environments, elevation of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL), and the advancement of our institutional mission by nurturing a thriving community of teacher-scholars. She is a proponent of reflective and restorative practices for centering diversity, equity, and inclusion which she operationalizes as a trained facilitator for the national, NSF-funded Inclusive STEM Teaching Project (ISTP) and as a licensed Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Professor Tarleton is the Project Lead for LMU’s Driving Change initiative, a $2.5 million project funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Driving Change is a 5-year strategic initiative within Seaver College that aims to foster change in our institutional definitions of student success and to develop, pilot and assess a model for equity-centered faculty development and leadership development that could feasibly be adapted across LMU.
Professor Tarleton has served at LMU as an associate dean for Seaver College, faculty-in-residence for Student Affairs, and as advisor to the McNair Scholars program, Health and Society minor, and Bioethics Institute. Externally, Professor Tarleton serves on the Governing Council for Maternal Mental Health-Now and the Oversight Committee for the National Institutes of Health - Network of Minority Health Research Investigators.