Executive Director of JEP
Dr. Susan Harris is the Executive Director of the University of Southern California’s (USC) Joint Educational Project (JEP), a service-learning program that serves more than 2000 undergraduate students and tens of thousands of children and families every year. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology and Marriage & Family Therapy from the University of Southern California in 2001. Dr. Harris’ interdisciplinary, qualitative research and clinical training in graduate school focused on the politics of service in the AmeriCorps national service program as well as the experiences of relative caregivers in the Los Angeles County child welfare system. Following her graduation, Dr. Harris served as the Director of Qualitative Research for the USC Transmission of Religion Across Generations Study. She was a contributing author of the book that resulted from that project, Families and Faith, which won the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociology Association’s Sociology of Religion Section and the Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America.
Dr. Harris has presented and published widely on a number of subjects important to the service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) field, including reflective practices, community partnerships, international service-learning, student learning outcomes, and the potential of online learning platforms (including “digital badges” or “microcredentials”) for the SLCE field. She has served as an Associate Editor of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and a Section Editor for the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. She is a member of the board for the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement and has served as Conference Chair for the 2019 and 2021 IARSLCE conferences.