Rate My Professor Margaret Gardner

Professor Margaret Gardner is an Australian academic and economist with expertise in industrial relations and human resource management. She earned a Bachelor of Economics with first class honours and a PhD from the University of Sydney, where her doctoral thesis examined Australian industrial relations. Following her doctorate, she received a Fulbright scholarship and pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell University.

Professor Gardner has held senior executive and leadership positions at multiple Australian universities, including Deakin University, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, and as Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Queensland. She served as Vice-Chancellor and President of RMIT University from 2005 to 2014 and as the ninth President and Vice-Chancellor of Monash University from September 2014 until August 2023, becoming the first woman to hold that role at Monash. She has authored and co-authored texts on industrial relations and human resource management, including Employment Relations: Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management in Australia, and chaired Queensland Government taskforces that produced reviews on industrial relations legislation, post-compulsory education pathways, and labour market participation. Her contributions to higher education leadership have been recognised with appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 and Companion of the Order of Australia in 2020, as well as election as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has served as Chair of Universities Australia and the Group of Eight, and currently holds the position of Governor of Victoria.