Shawn S. McGruder serves as Senior Associate General Counsel and Principal Equal Employment Opportunity Officer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). Ms. McGruder holds a B.B.A. in Finance and J.D. from Howard University. She also holds an Executive Certificate in Public Policy from the Harvard University Kennedy School. Ms. McGruder has been active on the boards of two legal trade associations, the National Bar Association and the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Baltimore Chapter. She has served as a presenter and thought leader for both organizations.

Before joining APL, Ms. McGruder was the Executive Director of the Center for Civil Rights Enforcement at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)., where she provided Senior Executive Service (SES) leadership to 75 federal and contract staff in the intake, investigation, and adjudication of EEO complaints from USDA employees and civil rights complaints from the public. In October 2012, USDA initially appointed her to the SES as USDA’s Assistant General Counsel for General Law and Research, where she managed multi-disciplinary general law and litigation matters across 20+ USDA sub-agencies and staff offices.

Ms. McGruder came to USDA from the Social Security Administration (SSA), where she began as a legal intern. She served assignments as Deputy Associate Commissioner for Labor-Management and Employee Relations and a Senior Advisor to the Acting Associate Commissioner for Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity. She also encumbered supervisory attorney positions in SSA's Philadelphia Region and at SSA Headquarters—last serving as Director of the Personnel Law Division, where she managed complex litigation, including nationwide employment class actions and civil rights cases.

Ms. McGruder is a native of Columbia, Maryland, and has been admitted to practice law in Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and before the U.S. Supreme Court.