Ruth Curran Neild became director of the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium (PERC) in January 2017. PERC is a research-practice partnership among the School District of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia charter school sector, Research for Action and three local universities.
Previously, Curran Neild served in several senior leadership roles at the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), including as commissioner of IES's National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance and as the delegated director of IES. In these roles, she championed rigorous and relevant research, research-practice partnerships and clear communication of research findings through a variety of media.
Curran Neild has been a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools and a member of the standing faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.
