Karen Albert, M.A. SOCY '96 Named New Chair of BSOS Board of Visitors
Karen Albert is the new chair of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences’ (BSOS) Board of Visitors (BOV), an alumni group that advises the dean and other college leadership on a broad range of topics, and that serves the BSOS student and alumni communities.
Karen, who graduated with her master’s degree from the Department of Sociology in 1996, is taking over for Gary Rozier, ECON ’99, who served as the BSOS BOV Chair for three years, and on the board for 10 years.
“I am absolutely thrilled to have Karen leading the BSOS Board of Visitors,” Dean Susan Rivera said. “Karen is joyful, kind, brilliant and driven, and I have absolutely zero doubt that under her direction, our cherished board will help position our college and its community for even greater success.”
Becoming the BSOS BOV Chair is just the latest act of service that Karen is taking on. She has been involved with the Marian House—an organization offering rehabilitative services and housing to women and families experiencing homelessness—since 2008, and the chair of its board of directors from 2021-2023.
She is also the executive sponsor of the affinity network for women, called Women Inspiring Networking & Success (WINS), at her employer, Constellium. Previously, she was a member of Executive Alliance—a Maryland-based organization focused on accelerating the success and leadership of accomplished women by expanding their impact and influence through advocacy, education, and mentorship—and she volunteered her time to the board of the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland for 12 years.
Early Life
Karen’s desire to serve was instilled in her at a young age.
“My father had a challenging childhood—he moved every year for various family and financial reasons—and one of the things he swore to my mom was that we would have a stable home, and we would never have to move unless we wanted to. So, we were very rooted in our community, from giving our books to the library when we were done reading them, to volunteering at various community events. It was just how our parents expected us to be,” the California native explained, going on to describe herself and her sister Dana as heart-led servant leaders.
When it came time for Karen to pick a career path at California State University, she initially picked one that has a very obvious, positive impact on people: Nursing. But it turns out that that career path sounded better to Karen in theory than in practice.
“In two different clinicals in the same week, when I had to give someone a shot, I passed out cold,” she said.
Fortunately, Karen had already taken a few sociology classes, and discovered she wasn’t too far off from being able to graduate with a degree in the field. A professor who was teaching one of the classes she was taking at that time, a sociology course on aging, also offered her a position at his research center at California State University, Bakersfield. It was that same professor who encouraged Karen to apply to graduate school—specifically five graduate schools, one of which was the University of Maryland.
Time at UMD and Beyond
“My professor had a connection at Maryland to Dr. [William “Bill”] Falk, who was the chair of the Department of Sociology at the time,” said Karen. “I got into all of the schools he told me to apply to, and I flew to Maryland, met Dr. Falk, and fell in love with campus and the university. And Dr. Falk said to me, ‘I have a research assistantship with a full-tuition scholarship. Do you want to come work for me?’ And I did.”
Karen said that the late Professor Emeritus Falk also told her at the time that she would get her graduate degree courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because he had just received a grant from the department to study the migration of people from the South to the North. That wound up being the topic of Karen’s master’s thesis, though Falk was supportive of Karen exploring her own research areas of interest along the way, too.
“‘Encouraging’ is one of the best ways I can describe him,” said Karen. “He was always very encouraging of me to explore whatever direction I was interested in within the broader research he was working on, and when I was finishing my master’s degree, when I went to him and said ‘I know that I don’t want to be a professor, so I think I am going to just take my master’s degree and go,’ he said ‘That’s fine, I am sure you will find a career path that will work for you.’ And I did.”
Immediately after graduating with her master’s degree, Karen took the programming skills she learned in graduate school and went to work for a pharmaceutical company doing sales analysis in California.
“I felt like that job was just a placeholder really, but it ended up launching me in the right direction because when I moved back to the East Coast, the best job I could find was a job in Philadelphia for a company that was focused on doing sales analysis and incentive compensation for a bunch of pharmaceutical companies,” Karen recalled. “In that role I learned project management, and project management led me to a job that finally got me back to Baltimore, which is where my now-husband was.”
That job was at a bank, working on “The Year 2000 Project,” a massive global IT remediation effort that was driven by a fear that once the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, there would be massive power outages and computer crashes. That project gave Karen her first exposure to internal audit, and once the project was completed, she wound up joining the bank’s internal audit team.
“Within three to six months, I realized that this was the job for me. I loved the detail orientation, the numbers side of things, the analytics … so from there it was just a series of job moves that led me to where I am now,” Karen said.
Following a four year stint in internal audit at that bank, Karen held various internal audit roles for more than 10 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and then more than six years at W.R. Grace & Co. Today, Karen is the Vice President and Head of Internal Audit at Constellium, an $8 billion global leader in the development, manufacturing, and recycling of aluminum products and solutions.
She says that the programming, data, analysis, and “people-reading” skills she acquired over the course of her graduate program really helped her find success in the corporate world.
“I can't thank Bill enough for the promise he saw in me, and for basically funding my graduate experience. That's why giving back to the university now is so important to me,” said Karen. “Bill really thought that there is no better investment in the future than in our students, and I know that me trying to figure out how to make my own contribution to that is definitely making him smile.”
Leaving a Legacy
Karen and Bill Falk also shared an interest in water and boating, something that Karen and her husband of 27 years, John, whom she met at the tail end of her master’s degree program at UMD, still enjoy today.
Karen and John also have a love for live music, and they enjoy travelling to see bands that they love at new music venues. Karen says they are also “a bit obsessed” with trivia—they watch “Jeopardy” every night—which was one of Karen’s favorite pastimes as a graduate student at UMD. Professors and graduate students used to team up against other competitors at the then-Santa Fe Cafe when she was a student.
As “beach people,” Karen and John are also in the process of moving toward even more water, selling their home in Essex, Maryland and moving with their two yellow labs, Cali (12) and Jules (8), into a new home in St. Augustine, Florida.
Karen doesn’t plan to just kick her feet up and relax once she arrives in Florida, however. Karen will continue her work leading internal audit and enterprise risk management at Constellium, which includes managing an international team of nine individuals with 13 different languages shared between them. She also has big plans for the BSOS BOV.
“What I really hope will be my legacy would be that each member of the board feels like they have contributed in a way that's meaningful to them,” she said. “Everyone has different skills, talents, time, treasure, etc., and everyone brings a different point of view, and the way that they can contribute to the success of the college is different, so I am looking forward to finding out how we take that and make it something that will improve the college.”
Like a true sociologist, Karen said she is a “studier of people.” She’s also a “doer.”
“From the very beginning of my time on the BOV, I told Dean [Susan] Rivera that I want to get my hands dirty. I can’t just be on a board for the sake of putting it on my resume. It’s really important to me to feel like I am actually contributing and doing something,” she said. “When I first joined, Dean Rivera was starting to roll out her strategic plan for the college, and I was so excited because strategic planning is part of what I love about my job.”
“I love Dean Rivera, and I think her vision for the college is amazing. The college is in a challenging environment right now from a funding perspective, but I think there’s also a lot of opportunity, and she has a great vision for that, including how the BOV can support that,” continued Albert. “I am happy to help guide us in that direction.”
Published on Mon, Jun 29, 2026 - 11:23AM