Ruth Neild

Ruth Curran Neild is director of the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium (PERC), a research– practice partnership that works alongside Philadelphia’s public education sectors to conduct practical, rigorous, independent research on locally prioritized education questions. PERC makes its home at Research for Action, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit education research organization. From 2011–17, Neild served in several senior leadership roles at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) arm of the U.S. Department of Education, including as the delegated director of IES from 2015 to 2016. In these roles, she championed rigorous and relevant research, research–practice partnerships, and clear communication of research findings through a variety of media. Previously, she was 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.