Shannon K. Gilmartin (she/her), PhD, is the Director of Research at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. She studies and writes about transformative engineering education and work environments, pathways of young people into engineering fields, and leadership trajectories once they are in the engineering workforce. She has a particular focus on women’s representation in high-status technical leadership positions and critical research and development projects.

Shannon’s publications appear in such outlets as Creativity and Innovation Management, Engineering Studies, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Engineering Education, Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, MIT Sloan Management Review, Prism, The Journal of Higher Education, and the International Journal of Engineering Education. From 2015-19, with Sheri Sheppard and Carol Muller, she co-taught the first course in Stanford’s School of Engineering to be cross-listed with Stanford’s Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs: “Expanding Engineering Limits: Culture, Diversity, and Equity”.  In 2018, her research with Anthony Antonio, Samantha Brunhaver, Helen Chen, and Sheri Sheppard was published in the National Bureau of Economics Research volume U.S. Engineering in the Global Economy (The University of Chicago Press). She co-led, with Sara Jordan-Bloch, the Leadership Lab’s Corporate Program Meeting on Early Career Pathways in 2019. She is currently conducting an ongoing Lab study of gender, race, and work assignments in technology companies. She has long collaborated with many undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, research scientists, and faculty members across a range of disciplines in large-scale studies of student experiences, workforce trends, and employment patterns, especially against the backdrop of social forces like stereotypes, bias and discrimination, labor market demands, and calls for greater technological innovation and entrepreneurship in response to the complex challenges of today.

Shannon received her BA at Stanford University in 1994, and her MA (1999) and PhD (2003) at University of California, Los Angeles. She then spent three years at the California Institute of Technology conducting research on the science identities of middle and high school students across diverse school districts in Southern California. She has consulted for a wide range of organizations, including the American Chemical Society, Stanford University School of Medicine, and University of Alaska School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.