Mary Coleman is the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath), the nation’s oldest and continuously woman-led organization in the nation. 

Prior to EMPath, for 5 years Mary was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Lesley University and professor of political science in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was founding director of the Center to Prevent Child Homelessness (at Lesley University). Before her deanship at Lesley University, Mary was professor of political science at Jackson State University (JSU), in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was also chair of the political science department, associate dean, and founding director of the Center for University Scholars. With JSU and the Mississippi Consortium for International Development as her platform, she lectured and co-invested in civil society organizations throughout the world--- from Baku, Azerbaijan; Cuba, the West Bank, Bucharest, Romania; to India, Angola, Zambia, Namibia, Fort Hare, Nigeria, and Harare, Zimbabwe---amassing over 20 million dollars annually in grants and contracts to provide cross-cultural study-abroad opportunities to students and faculty. In early 2000, she supported plaintiffs in the resolution of Ayers v. Waller/Fordice—a 24-year-old lawsuit to halt discrimination against Historically Black Colleges and Universities. 

Mary Coleman has received recognition for her scholarship on rural poverty and economic stratification. She won a coveted Woodrow Wilson International Scholar award in 2005, and has won research awards from the National Science Foundation and USAID. She was a Liberal Arts Fellow in Law and Political Science at Harvard Law School, and a post-doctoral fellow in Economics and Public Policy at the University of Maryland-College-Park.

She earned the PhD and MA degrees in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the BA from JSU, with honors. In addition to executive cross-cultural civics leadership and excellence in teaching, Mary is the author of two books: Legislators, Law, and Public Policy and Land, Promise, and Peril, published last year by Cambridge University Press (CUP). 

The native Mississippian has resided in Massachusetts for 13 years. She is the mom of Kiese Laymon, an endowed professor at Rice University and MacArthur recipient, and a grandmother of a vivacious toddler.