Charles Perfetti has made important and unique contributions to the fields of reading, cognition, and language over the past 4 decades. Few researchers have made so great an impact on our understanding of reading at such a range of levels. His seminal book, Reading Ability, showed the importance of low-level linguistic knowledge on reading. More recently, his Verbal Efficiency hypothesis and Lexical Quality hypothesis have been influential in shaping our understanding of the importance of reader’s knowledge of and access to information about a word’s orthographic, phonological, grammatical properties and its meaning. His work on individual differences in reading skill has been important to understanding both skilled performance and to identifying malleable trigger points for interventions. Charles was highly active in our Society’s formative years and his past students and post-docs have been very active in the society including a past president and several past board members.