Heather Gerken is the 11th president of the Ford Foundation. A nationally recognized expert on democracy, federalism, and elections, Gerken has spent her career working on bipartisan efforts to protect the rule of law.

As president of the Ford Foundation, she leads the $16 billion charitable foundation, which operates offices in the United States and 10 regions around the world.

Gerken has devoted much of her career to strengthening U.S. election systems and protecting the rule of law. In addition to her expansive portfolio of research on the subject, she has litigated major voting rights cases and testified on Capitol Hill on critical election-related issues. She has served as a trustee of the Campaign Legal Center, a commissioner on the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Commission on Political Reform, and most recently as a member of the American Bar Association’s Task Force for American Democracy, a bipartisan group of leaders in law, public administration, and politics dedicated to strengthening public trust in elections and supporting the rule of law. In 2013, her proposal for a “Democracy Index”—a national ranking of election systems—was adopted by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which went on to create the nation’s first Election Performance Index.

Before joining the Ford Foundation, Gerken served for eight years as dean of Yale Law School, the first woman to hold the position in the school’s 200-year history. As dean, she led her peers across legal education in expanding access to law school for veterans, low-income students, and first-generation college students, while launching innovative programs to strengthen academic freedom and free speech on campus.

During her tenure, Gerken led the efforts of law schools across the country to stop participating in college ranking systems, which disincentivized universities from supporting public interest careers, bolstering need-based aid, and recruiting students from low-income backgrounds. Under her leadership, Yale Law School created two pipeline-to-law programs and launched a first-of-its-kind need-based scholarship that now provides full tuition to 15% of its student body—sparking a trend across legal education. Gerken prioritized initiatives that fostered discourse across the political and ideological spectrum, ensured intellectual diversity across the faculty, and strengthened and protected free speech. 

In addition to leading Yale Law School, Gerken founded and worked directly with the country’s most innovative clinic in local government law, the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project (SFALP), which partners students with city attorneys to litigate on behalf of the City of San Francisco. For nearly two decades, the clinic has helped the city secure major victories, including a multimillion-dollar opioid settlement, a consumer protection case featured on the cover of Business Week, and a landmark case that legalized same-sex marriage in California.

Hailed as an “intellectual guru” by The New York Times, Gerken’s scholarship has appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, NPR, The New York Times, and Time Magazine. In 2017, Politico Magazine named her one of The Politico 50, a list of leading idea makers in American politics. Her work on election reform has influenced national policy and been the subject of four academic symposia. Gerken has served as a commentator for numerous major media outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC News.

Before her tenure at Yale, Gerken was a professor at Harvard Law School and practiced law at Jenner & Block, where she litigated voting rights cases and helped secure a major housing desegregation settlement.

A native of Massachusetts, Gerken graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1991 and from the University of Michigan Law School in 1994 as a Darrow Scholar. After law school, she clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. She later served as an appellate lawyer in Washington, D.C., before joining the Harvard Law School faculty in 2000. Gerken joined Yale Law School in 2006 and became the inaugural J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law in 2008. She served as Dean of Yale Law School from 2017 to 2025 and was named Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law—the university’s highest academic honor—upon her departure.

Gerken is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former trustee of both Princeton University and the Mellon Foundation.