February 18, 2026
Distinguished University Professor Charles (Chuck) Perfetti retired from the University on January 31, 2026. As Professor of Psychology, Perfetti served as chair of the department of psychology, founding chair of its PhD program in cognitive psychology, and interim chair of the Department of Linguistics. He received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award in 2000 and was named a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology in 2001.
From 2008 to 2024, Perfetti was Director of the Learning Research & Development Center (LRDC), a leading interdisciplinary center for research on learning and education. During this period, he led LRDC in the development of new research directions through 14 new faculty level appointments, establishing child development as a major LRDC research area, encouraging new research on college student learning and well-being, and supporting equity and inclusion in learning opportunities, while also strengthening its neuroscience and learning technology components and increasing connections with the undergraduate education mission of the university.
Provost Joseph McCarthy, in announcing the transition, remarked that “Chuck’s contributions to the science of learning — and to the University community — are far-reaching, and the LRDC and the next generations of learning and educational scientists will continue to benefit from the solid foundation he has built.” For the Provost’s complete statement (Transition in the Learning Research and Development Center).
Perfetti has mentored more than 30 pre-doctoral trainees and 25 postdoctoral fellows over the course of his career, the majority of whom went on to teach at research universities around the globe or in other research setting such as NIH and ETS. The topics they address reflect the multiple levels of language and the range of behavioral and neuroscience methodologies of his research. Perfetti received the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring in 2022.
An international authority on the cognitive science of reading and second language processes, Perfetti’s research spans a wide range of issues – the nature of reading skill, processes of both comprehension and word identification, learning word meanings, learning from multiple texts, and learning to read. His Lexical Quality Hypothesis is frequently cited for explaining how mental representations of word forms and meanings support reading proficiency. He has sought to identify the aspects of reading that are universal and those that are language-specific. The third of three volumes on reading and literacy edited by Perfetti and a team of international collaborators was published in 2024. Across 17 written languages, the volumes address the relation between the spoken word and the written word, offering insight into how learning to read is affected by specific language and writing systems.
Perfetti has received the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Awards of both the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and the Society for Text Discourse, just two examples of his many awards (see Transition in the Learning Research and Development Center). His research is published in more than 275 articles and book chapters, two books, and seven co-edited books. His papers have been cited over 68,000 times (Google Scholar, February 2026; h-index 124). In 2016, he was named one of the top ten Highest Cited American Scholars in the field of education.
Perfetti will be recognized on March 16, 2026, by Pitt colleagues and by former students, who have continued to contribute to an ever-increasing knowledge base about cognition, learning, and reading.