Heather K. Gerken

Heather Kristin Gerken (born February 19, 1969) is an American legal scholar. She has been the president of the Ford Foundation since November 2025. She was the 17th dean of Yale Law School from 2017 to 2025.

Early life and education Gerken grew up in Bolton, Massachusetts. She was educated at Nashoba Regional High School, graduated in 1987, and received a Presidential Scholarship.

In 1991, Gerken graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in history after completing a 123-page long senior thesis titled "Stepping Out of the Bounds of Womanhood: An Analysis of the Popular Image of Women and Women's Experiences during World War II". She was the recipient of the university's Dodds Prize, given to top seniors, and the Kenneth C. Harris Award for research.

After college, Gerken enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She graduated in 1994 with a Juris Doctor, summa cum laude, and membership in the Order of the Coif. She was editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review and was named the commencement speaker of her class.

In 2009, in her book The Democracy Index (Princeton University Press), she proposed an index that would rate and compare the performance of elections systems at the state and local levels, to evaluate and improve the U.S. elections system. She became dean of Yale Law School in 2017, and in the same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2021, she was named to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, created by President Joe Biden in order to "provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform" in the context of evaluating the history and future of the court and its practices.

In January 2022, Yale University President Peter Salovey announced that Gerken had been reappointed as dean of Yale Law School for a second five-year term. While at Yale Law, she also served as the Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law.

In August 2025, Gerken stepped down from her role as dean to become president of the Ford Foundation.

Personal life

Gerken is the great-granddaughter of Sir Ernest Bland Royden.

Gerken is married to David Simon.