Gail O'Connor Mellow was President from 2000 to 2019 of LaGuardia Community College located in Long Island City, New York. [1] [2]
Mellow was born in 1952. [3] She received an A.A. from Jamestown Community College. [4] She received her B.A. from SUNY Albany and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [5]
Mellow has had several leadership positions in different educational institutions. Immediately previous to her presidency of LaGuardia Community College, she was president of Gloucester County College, a position from which she resigned to take the presidency of LaGuardia, succeeding Raymond C. Bowen. [2] [6] Mellow has also served on numerous boards that include the Homeland Security Academic Advisory Council, [7] American Association for Higher Education, the National Commission for Cooperative Education, and the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.[ citation needed]
She is the co-author of Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College. [8] She is also the author of numerous articles on the subjects of community colleges, economic development, and diverse faculty development.[ citation needed]
Mellow founded and chaired the (NECEA) Northeast Connecticut Economic Alliance, a nonprofit development agency. She was also a member of the Human Resource Development Board of the Connecticut Employment and Training Commission. She represented the United States in the first US-China Community College collaborative conference meeting, which was held in Beijing in 2004. She is a consulting editor for Change magazine, a national magazine for higher education.[ citation needed]