Gloria Cordes Larson

Remarks | Former President, Bentley University and Board Member, MA Conference for Women

GLORIA CORDES LARSON is a respected lawyer, public policy expert, Boston business leader, and former university president. She currently serves as a director on the public company board of Unum Group, as well as on the boards of private company, reacHIRE. In addition, she is a member of the boards of several other national and regional nonprofit organizations. In 2011, Larson launched the Center for Women and Business at Bentley University, which was named in her honor when she stepped down as president in 2018. While at Bentley, Larson also authored the book PreparedU: How Innovative Colleges Prepare Students for Success. Following her retirement from Bentley, Larson served as president in residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education through June 2019. She has been named to the Power 50 by the Boston Business Journal and Boston magazine, listed on The Commonwealth Institute’s roster of the Boston Globe magazine’s Top 100 Women-Led Businesses in Massachusetts, and awarded the 2018 Ellen M. Zane award for Visionary Leadership from Tufts Medical Center. More recently, Larson was named one of the University of Virginia School of Law’s One Hundred Change Agents, and in 2021 she was selected as one of NACD’s Top 100 Public Company Directors. She’s married to attorney Allen Larson and is the proud owner of two English labs, Sally and Olive