Marilee Bresciani Ludvik, Ph.D.

Marilee Bresciani Ludvik, Ph.D. serves as chair and professor of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department at The University of Texas Arlington. Prior to that, she served as professor of postsecondary educational leadership at San Diego State University, assistant vice president of institutional assessment at Texas A&M University and in a variety of student affairs, academic affairs, and alumni relations leadership roles at various types of institutions. Bresciani Ludvik also served as a faculty fellow within the Office of Curriculum, Assessment, and Accreditation as well as the Office of Analytic Studies and Institutional Research at San Diego State, where she assisted in connecting student learning and development outcomes to equity performance indicators in a manner that can inform improvements in-class, out-of-class, and program design and delivery.

Marilee has written 13 books, published over 200 scholarly articles, and empowered over 200 institutions and their leaders on organizational learning assessment and accountability decision-making processes. In addition, Marilee assists organizational leaders to identify and leverage opportunities to collaborate across division lines, using mindfulness-based inquiry practices, nonviolent communication, difficult conversation practices, paradigm busting processes, compassion practices, restorative justice, and design thinking. 

Marilee is a certified meditation and yoga instructor, certified Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute teacher (the program developed at Google), and a Qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher on the certification path. Marilee is also a certified transformational life coach who uses the evocative method. 

Dr. Bresciani Ludvik co-directs the Intrapersonal Competency Cultivation Research Team that seeks to leverage student’s first-person experience to close equity gaps through the cultivation of malleable skills known to significantly predict student success.  Marilee’s research specifically focuses on applying social and emotional neuroscience and mindful compassion inquiry practices to inform the design and evaluation of workshops, curriculum, and coaching to decrease students’, faculty, and administrators’ stress and anxiety while also increasing their attention and emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and enhancing compassion towards self and other.

Dr. Bresciani Ludvik’s work has been honored with awards such as the International Association for Student Personnel Pillar of the Profession Award in 2012, the International Association for Student Personnel George Kuh Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature/Research in Higher Education in 2013, the American College Personnel Administrators Diamond Honoree in 2016, the UNESCO/MGIEP Senior Research Fellow in 2017, and the International Association for Student Personnel Robert H. Shaffer Award for Academic Excellence as a Graduate Faculty Member in 2019. She has also recently been inducted into the University of Texas Arlington National Academy of Inventors.

Marilee is thrilled that she gets to empower educators, staff, administrators, and student leaders into emotional awareness so they can positively transform their lives and the lives of those they serve!