Dr. Jennifer Lucko Wins Joseph R. Fink Faculty Achievement Award

Dr. Jennifer Lucko, professor and co-chair of the Education Department, has received the 2025 Joseph R. Fink Faculty Achievement Award. Dr. Lucko was presented the award at the university’s fall undergraduate commencement ceremony in December.

The Joseph R. Fink Faculty Achievement Award, named for the institution’s eighth president, honors a faculty member’s lifetime achievement and dedication to Dominican.

Dr. Lucko’s research explores the social construction of identity among marginalized students within the intersecting processes of schooling, systemic inequality, and discrimination. In her 18 years at Dominican, Dr. Lucko has made significant contributions to the Master of Science in Education program, enhancing its scholarly rigor. She is consistently described by her colleagues and students as compassionate, rigorous, tough, supportive, generous, and dedicated.

Dr. Lucko has played a key role in the development of new programming at the university, co-designing the Community Action and Social Change (CASC) minor and teaching foundational and capstone classes within the Social Justice major. 

She has collaborated with the Service-Learning Program and the Center for Community Engagement on various projects, including working with community leaders who are members of the group Voces del Canal on an advocacy project to improve safety by increasing public lighting throughout San Rafael’s Canal neighborhood. 

Under Dr. Lucko’s guidance, Spanish bilingual Dominican students worked alongside Voces del Canal as they advocated for Canal neighborhood priorities. 

The efforts of the Canal neighborhood residents and the Dominican students were highly acclaimed with the San Rafael City Council acknowledging that the project had “broken the mold,” “written the playbook,” and “cracked the code” in civic engagement. As a result, the City Council allocated $100,000 to enhance public lighting in the Canal and initiated plans for a model of community policing with Voces del Canal to improve public security. 

Dr. Lucko’s current research explores how undergraduate and graduate students use their research findings to develop innovative policies and practices within the schools and community partners where they conducted original research. In addition to examining the specific contexts that support students in the process of moving from research to action, she investigates the role of critical consciousness in the ways in which students construct their own understanding of action research.

Dr. Lucko received her PhD and MA in anthropology from UC Berkeley. She received a master’s in education from San Francisco State University and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Toledo, Ohio.