Gentry posthumously awarded 2022 LuAnn Aday Award
Marcia Gentry has been selected as a 2022 LuAnn Aday Award recipient upon the recommendation of humanities and social sciences faculty representatives and is approved by the Purdue University Office of Research and the President. She will be honored at the annual Excellence in Research Awards ceremony on April 6 from 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. at the Purdue Memorial Union.
This award is intended to honor a recent past achievement(s) of major impact and recognizes Gentry’s major impact in research and scholarship in large part through her 2019 national report on representation in gifted programs by race, income, and locale, Access Denied/System Failure. This report provides concrete data and recommendations to address elitism, classism, sexism, and segregation in gifted education.
Prior to her passing in August 2022, Gentry was the director of the College’s Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute (GER2I) and professor of Educational Studies. In 2022 she received the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) President’s Award for pioneering and continued leadership in the field of gifted education. She also received a $3.2 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program with colleagues Yukiko Maeda, Nielsen Pereira, Jennifer Richardson, and Kristen Seward.
A lecture, “The legacy of Marcia Gentry: excellence, equity and talent development,” will be given by Gentry’s colleagues, Nielsen Pereira, associate professor of educational studies and interim co-director of GER2I, and Kristen Seward, clinical associate professor of educational studies and fellow GER2I interim co-director, after 3:00 p.m. in the same location in the Union.
Gentry was a giant in the field of gifted, creative, and talented education. Before she entered higher education, she spent 12 years in K-12 settings as a teacher and administrator. She received her PhD from the University of Connecticut in 1996 with a specialization in Gifted and Talented Development, Educational Psychology and Research, Measurement, and Evaluation.
The Lu Ann Aday Award was established in 2017 by Purdue alumna Lu Ann Aday, the Lorne D. Bain Distinguished Professor Emerita in Public Health and Medicine at the University of Texas School of Public Health Houston. It annually recognizes a member of the Purdue faculty who has made a major impact in the humanities and social sciences. Recipients are nominated by colleagues, recommended by a faculty committee and named by the university president.