Laurie Elish-Piper

Laurie Elish-Piper, Ph.D. serves as the Executive Vice President and Provost of Northern Illinois University (NIU). In this role, her work focuses on student experience and success, academic innovation and efficiency, adult learner and transfer student initiatives, faculty development and support, and cross divisional collaboration. She leads NIU’s Student Experience Team (SET) which coordinates student success efforts across the Divisions of Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. SET’s comprehensive, systematic commitment to advancing student success through sustainable and innovative initiatives was honored in 2025 by the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) as a finalist for the Excellence in Student Success Award.

Elish-Piper previously served as Dean of the College of Education where she launched the college’s Partnering to Lead and Empower District-Grown Educators (PLEDGE) program to address the educator shortage in urban and rural communities. Under her leadership, the College expanded innovative academic programs and increased student recruitment, enrollment, and retention. She is a strong advocate for the importance of high quality and engaging teaching, and she also holds the titles of Distinguished Teaching Professor and Distinguished Engagement Professor as a tenured professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

She remains an active and engaged scholar in the areas of reading education, teacher preparation, literacy assessment, literacy coaching, and family engagement. She has co-authored a dozen books and more than eighty articles and chapters. In 2021, she received the A.B. Herr Award for outstanding contributions to the field of reading. She began her career as a teacher in middle school and elementary classrooms and as an educational therapist in an acute care psychiatric hospital. Her decades of scholarship and advocacy work focus on ensuring that all students at all levels have access to caring teachers and high-quality instruction, so they are ready for success in college, careers, and life.

Elish-Piper is deeply committed to civic and professional engagement. She currently serves on the Governing Board of the Alignment Collaborative for Education and previously served on the Alignment Rockford Steering Committee for Early Childhood Education and on the Curriculum Development Team for Altus Academy in Chicago. She is a founding member of the DeKalb/Sycamore Bookcase Project, which builds and provides personalized bookcases and books to low-income preschool children enrolled in Two Rivers Head Start. She has also recently held leadership roles with professional associations including President of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers, Executive Committee Member of APLU’s Council on Academic Affairs, and Board of Directors of the International Literacy Association.