After a national search, Katherine Dunn will join Georgia State University’s Georgia Policy Labs (GPL) as its senior director, effective Sept. 1.

“Ms. Dunn is joining the Georgia Policy Labs at an opportune time as we seek to build on its national reputation, expand its active research-practice partnerships and grow its impact in producing engaged, actionable research,” Dean Thomas J. Vicino of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies (AYSPS) said. “She brings additional strengths and recognition to our well-established group of researchers and research affiliates, dedicated and talented staff, and outstanding data infrastructure.”

The Georgia Policy Labs, launched in 2017, is a research-practice partnership among Georgia State University and a coalition of school district, state agency and nonprofit partners. Its work drives policy and programmatic decisions that lift children, students and families, especially those experiencing vulnerabilities. GPL faculty, staff and students work alongside its partners, leveraging data to provide policymakers the information and tools they need to improve the effectiveness of existing policies and programs, try new ideas for addressing pressing issues and decide what new initiatives are promising enough to scale up. This work is done within two education-focused policy labs — MAPLE (Metro Atlanta Policy Lab for Education) and CTEx (Career & Technical Education Policy Exchange) — and the Child & Family Policy Lab, which was created in 2019.

Prior to joining GPL, Dunn served as the program director and senior attorney for the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn program, which supports campaigns across the country in the fight for quality education and an end to the school-to-prison pipeline. Previously, she spent more than a decade working toward education justice in the South, serving as a regional policy analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a general attorney at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and as a program director at the Southern Education Foundation, where her work focused on research and advocacy to ensure equity in public education in the South.

Named to the Daily Report’s 2020 class of Georgia lawyers “On the Rise,” Dunn is past co-chair of the American Constitution Society’s Georgia Lawyer Chapter and the Georgia chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of LEAD Atlanta, an initiative of Leadership Atlanta, Class of 2018. She is an education ambassador with the Partnership for the Future of Learning, an adviser to Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and she has served on the board of Sur Legal Collaborative. She holds a J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law and a B.S. from Elon University.