Lindback Award Goes to GSE's Laura Perna

April 5, 2010 - Penn GSE Professor Laura Perna has been named a recipient of Penn’s 2009-10 Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Dr. Perna’s scholarship and teaching focus on access, choice, and equity in higher education; college finance and affordability; and federal and state involvement in pre-college and college education. She serves as the director of policy studies for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and on the boards/committees of a number of organizations including the National Council of Higher Education Loan Programs, the Thurgood Marshall Fund, Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education GEAR UP, Institute for Higher Education Policy, and Lumina Foundation for Education. She was recently elected to serve a three-year term as Vice President of Division J of the American Educational Research Association.  In addition, she sits on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals.

In 2003, the Association for the Study of Higher Education awarded her the Promising Scholar/Early Career Achievement Award, given to an emerging scholar "for a significant body of scholarship or a single extraordinary research achievement by a higher education scholar, and in recognition of potential for future research."

Prior to her appointment at Penn GSE, she was a faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park.  She holds a B.A. in psychology and B.S. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master’s of Public Policy and Ph.D. in education from the University of Michigan.

The Lindback Awards were established in 1961 with the help of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation. Christian Lindback was president and principal of Abbotts Dairies, Inc. and a trustee of Bucknell University. The Foundation established the awards at colleges and universities New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia.  Penn awards eight Lindback Awards annually; award winners are determined by nominations and recommendations made by faculty and students in December based on certain guidelines.


Media contact: Jill DiSanto-Haines at 215-898-4820 or jdisanto@upenn.edu