Episode 8: Ruth Lopez Turley (Rice University)

This week, we sat down with Ruth Lopez Turley, professor of sociology at Rice University. She founded the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC), a research-practice partnership between Rice University and several Houston area school districts, including the Houston Independent School District. Turley also founded the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP), which supports and develops partnerships between research institutions and education agencies throughout the country. 

Turley completed her undergraduate work at Stanford University (1996) and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (2001), where she was a doctoral fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. Prior to coming to Rice, she was an assistant and associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where she was a faculty affiliate of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences (ITP), and the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP). In 2004, she was a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellow.