David C. Perry is the Director of the Great Cities Institute and Professor of Urban Planning and Policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. He also serves as Associate Chancellor for the university’s Great Cities Commitment. The Great Cities Institute is a university-wide research center, and, as a core element of UIC’s Great Cities Commitment, it has attracted well over 150 faculty from 35 disciplines at UIC to study the cities of the world from an engaged research perspective.

Perry is the author or editor of ten books, including the forthcoming The University, The City and Land: Comparative Studies, edited with Wim Wiewel, and over 100 articles, book chapters and reports on the "engaged university", the university as an urban institution, urban and regional economic development and policy, race, politics and urban violence, segregation and the production of urban space. Perry is an equally experienced policy practitioner having served on numerous national and local public boards and commissions.

Perry received his PhD from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and went on to teach in the Government Department at the University of Texas in Austin. From 1982 to 1998, Perry was Professor of Planning at the School of Planning and Architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Senior Faculty Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. In the early 1990's, he spent two and one-half years as the Albert A. Levin Chair of Urban Studies and Public Service at Cleveland State University and currently holds a permanent appointment as an Albert A. Levin Scholar. Perry retains the title of Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Communications at San Diego State University where he spent the 1998-1999 academic year. He joined UIC in 1999 as director of the Great Cities Institute.