Eva Fernandez

Eva M. Fernández, PhD, is a higher education leader with experience fostering faculty effectiveness in teaching, deepening learning through experiential education, strengthening institutions through shared governance, and forging institutional and community partnerships.  Her expertise centers on how faculty development, course redesign, informal learning, experiential education, and peer mentoring influence student learning.

Dr. Fernández has served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Mercy University, overseeing six Schools and several faculty- and student-facing support units. (As of July 15, 2024, she is on a sabbatical leave from this position.) During the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Fernández served as Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, in the City University of New York (CUNY), where she oversaw the innovative and impactful academic programs that prepare Guttman students to successfully enter the workforce or a four-year baccalaureate program. Before that appointment, she served for nine years at Queens College, CUNY, in executive leadership roles, including as Associate Provost for Innovation and Student Success at Queens College, Assistant Provost for Teaching Excellence and Experiential Education, and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. These roles included projects that advanced student learning and success through faculty development, experiential education, and targeted academic support.

Dr. Fernández has received funding for evidence-based institutional interventions from federal agencies and private foundations, including the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Education, the Petrie Foundation, and the New York City Department of Small Business Services. Dr. Fernández’s interests in how people learn and use languages led to majors in Linguistics and German at New York University (BA, 1991) and to graduate work in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center (MA, 1995, and PhD, 2000). Her body of scholarly research focuses on bilingual sentence processing and also includes works on institutional interventions related to faculty development. She joined Queens College in 2000 as faculty, reaching the rank of tenured full professor in 2015. While at CUNY, she also held doctoral faculty appointments at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD Programs in Linguistics; Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures; and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences.  When joining Mercy, she was appointed as Professor with Tenure in the School of Education.