Marion Underwood serves as the provost and executive vice president of George Mason University, the largest public research university in Virginia and a Carnegie R1 institution.
As provost and executive vice president, Underwood oversees George Mason’s academic mission, supporting scholarly excellence among faculty and fostering academic success for more than 40,000 students on all four campuses.
She joined the university in July 2026 and works in conjunction with President Gregory Washington to shape and execute the university’s strategic academic priorities. She also serves as professor in the Department of Psychology within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Biography
Marion Underwood is the provost and executive vice president of George Mason University. Prior to her appointment at George Mason, Provost Underwood served as provost and executive vice president at Colorado State University (CSU). In this role she created a strategic roadmap for CSU to become a national model for the modern land grant universities, led the vision for a CSU System initiative to enhance student mental health, and played a critical role in fine-tuning CSU’s new budget model. Alongside her administrative duties, Provost Underwood was a professor of psychology at CSU, specializing in child clinical psychology and developmental psychology.
Provost Underwood has also held notable academic leadership roles at Purdue University and the University of Texas (UT) at Dallas. At Purdue, she served as dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences from 2018 to 2023, where she led the college through a period of strong enrollment. She culminated her 20-year career at the UT Dallas by serving as dean of graduate studies and associate provost from 2015 to 2018, a period marked by a 29 percent increase in annually awarded doctoral degrees.
A scholar of psychology, Provost Underwood’s research focuses on the developmental origins and outcomes of social aggression and how adolescents’ digital communication relates to adjustment. She has published more than 100 articles in numerous scientific journals, and the National Institutes of Health supported her research program for more than 25 years. An Association of Psychological Sciences Fellow, Provost Underwood received the National Institute of Mental Health’s FIRST Award, as well as its Independent Scientist Mid-Career Award. She was also recognized as an Ashbel Smith Professor at UT Dallas and a distinguished professor at Purdue.
Provost Underwood received her BA in psychology from Wellesley University, and her MA and PhD in clinical psychology from Duke University.