FACULTY FELLOW - Dr. Danielle Boisvert

Dr. Danielle Boisvert is currently the Associate Dean for Student Development in the College of Criminal Justice (COCJ).  Prior to this appointment, she served as the Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology for over seven years and as the Assistant Department Chair for over two years. As Associate Dean, she provides leadership and strategic vision and direction in the area of student success for over 3,300 undergraduate and 400 graduate students across the College’s four departments.

Dr. Boisvert’s educational background includes degrees from the hard sciences and social sciences: an undergraduate degree in Biology, a master’s in Forensic Science, and a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice.  These diverse perspectives on human behavior have shaped her research trajectory and have resulted in an active research agenda, as evidenced in over 45 peer-reviewed publications, 70 conference presentations, and several invited lectures. She has attended the annual Texas Women in Higher Education conference for professional development on leadership; recently completed the year-long Texas Academic Leadership Academy (TALA) program; and has completed The Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) Course in Effective Teaching Practices. 

She was also recently selected as a 2021 Faculty Administrative Fellow by SHSU’s Office of the Provost, to lead a project with the end goal of improving retention rates, particularly among students in academic distress. In her role as Associate Dean, one of Dr. Boisvert’s main responsibilities includes monitoring and responding to student success metrics, including student suspension and probation cases and more broadly, retention rates.  This work will inform and focus her project specifically on student retention and persistence by targeting students in academic distress to connect them with the necessary resources available at SHSU through one or more of the several mechanisms available.

“Central to these efforts would be to better communicate the services and resources available across the different units to administrators, faculty, and most importantly, to students,” noted Dr. Boisvert. “There are already a number of university-wide efforts in place or underway that align with this objective.  Not only do we have a duty to identify these students in academic distress, we can also improve facilitating student awareness of resources available to them.”  Updating academic policy, and gathering and analyzing data to measure the effectiveness of current and implemented efforts geared toward retention will also be objectives of the program.