Dr. Lynn Perry Wooten

Dr. Wooten is the ninth president of Simmons University and the first African American to lead the university. A seasoned academic and an expert on organizational development and transformation, Lynn specializes in crisis leadership, diversity and inclusion, and positive leadership – organizational behavior that reveals and nurtures the highest level of human potential. Lynn is an innovative leader, presenter, and prolific author whose research has informed her work in the classroom and as an administrator. With leadership at the core of her work, Dr. Wooten’s research has ranged from an NIH-funded investigation of how leadership can positively alleviate health disparities to leading in a crisis and managing workforce diversity. She is co-author of the Wall Street Journal best-selling book Arrive and Thrive: 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership and a co-author on her latest book The Prepared Leader.  She has also authored two previous books, Positive Organizing in a Global Society: Understanding and Engaging Differences for Capacity Building and Inclusion (2016) and Leading Under Pressure: From Surviving to Thriving Before, During, and After a Crisis (2010). Sharing her work at nearly 60 symposia and conferences, she also is the author of nearly 30 journal articles and more than 15 book chapters, as well as managerial monographs and numerous teaching cases.

Lynn has also maintained a robust clinical practice, providing leadership development, education, and training for a wide variety of companies and institutions, from the Kellogg Foundation to Harvard University’s Kennedy School to Google.

Lynn grew up in Philadelphia. She is married to David Wooten, a chaired marketing professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. They have two children, Justin and Jada.