Penn reappointed Laura Perna, the GSE Centennial Presidential Professor of Education, as vice provost for faculty.
Graduate School of Education professor Laura Perna has been reappointed as the University’s vice provost for faculty.
Perna was first appointed to the position in 2020 and has furthered a number of initiatives including “new websites, interactive dashboards, and e-newsletters catering to faculty needs and interests.”
“[Perna] has been an invaluable partner in furthering the work of all twelve schools and the Faculty Senate, steering faculty hiring, promotion, and retention with great judgment and skill, including collaborating with schools to improve our procedures for external consultants,” Jackson wrote in the announcement.
Perna graduated from Penn in 1988 with bachelor’s degrees in economics and psychology from the Wharton School and College of Arts and Sciences before pursuing public policy and education in her master’s degree and Ph.D. programs, respectively, at the University of Michigan. She first joined the University as a professor in 2005.
While maintaining professorship, she was named GSE’s Centennial Presidential Professor of Education in 2019 as well as one of the co-founders and now-Executive Director of Penn GSE Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy.
In her statement to the Almanac, Perna wrote that it was a great honor to be reappointed to her position and she is “deeply committed to continuing our vital work of advancing the recruitment, retention, development, promotion, happiness, and well-being of Penn faculty, in partnership with the Provost, deans, Faculty Senate, and our other inspiring leaders and colleagues across campus.”
In the GSE faculty directory, Perna is described as “an expert in college access, affordability, and success, especially for low-income, first-generation, and non-traditional students.”
Prior to her appointment as vice provost for faculty, Perna served as vice president of the American Educational Research Association’s Division J from 2010 to 2013 and was the president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education from 2014 to 2015.
Throughout these roles, she has published multiple bodies of work, has been cited in The Washington Post and The New York Times, advised policymakers, and testified in front of Congress on “The Role of States in Higher Education” to the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
She has previously been awarded the Excellence in Public Policy in Higher Education Award from ASHE’s Council on Public Policy in Higher Education, elected to the National Academy of Education, and earned a Lindback Foundation Award from Penn for Distinguished Teaching.
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