Terry Babcock-Lumish (Pennsylvania 1996)

Over the last 25 years, Dr. Terry Babcock-Lumish has served in local, state, and federal government for both Democratic and Republican administrations. She has worked in academia, policy development, has advised leading global foundations, and worked on the ground with community-based nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. In short, she has experience at almost every level and in all forms of public service.

Before joining the Truman Foundation, Dr. Babcock-Lumish led Islay, a certified minority and women-owned small business she founded in 2005 to provide strategic guidance for philanthropic foundations and other mission-driven organizations across six continents. In recent years, Dr. Babcock-Lumish held academic affiliations at the University of Arizona, the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, the Rothermere American Institute and the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she co-founded a civ-mil partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. Previously she served as the inaugural Newman Director of Public Policy at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, a center dedicated to education, research, and civic engagement in the historic New York City home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Dr. Babcock-Lumish completed her BS at Carnegie Mellon University, and earned her MPA in environmental and technology policy at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs as a Lilly Community Assistance Fellow. She read her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford as a Truman and Clarendon Scholar.

Dr. Babcock-Lumish was named a Truman Scholar in 1996 from Pennsylvania. She is the 2012 recipient of the Truman Foundation’s Elmer B. Staats Award.