About
Lauren Patel joined Alderson Broaddus in 2021 as Controller and was promoted to Vice President for Finance & Operations in 2023. She is responsible for the University's $48M annual operating budget, the management of the $58M endowment, capital projects (including the $42M Pickett Center for Rural Health Innovation), human resources, facilities, dining services, and the campus auxiliary enterprises.
A first-generation college graduate from suburban Pittsburgh, Patel earned a B.S. in Accounting (with honors) from Penn State and an M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. She spent her early career in the Higher Education Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, then served for nine years as Director of Financial Reporting at the University of Pittsburgh before being recruited to AB.
Patel is a licensed CPA in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. She holds her staff to what she calls "the second-grade-teacher standard": every report to the Board of Trustees, every memo to a department chair, and every grant accounting reconciliation must be readable, accurate, and patient with someone who is encountering it for the first time.
Education
- 2013M.B.A. — Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. Concentration in finance and accounting. Beta Gamma Sigma.
- 2008B.S., Accounting (with honors) — Penn State University, Smeal College of Business. Phi Beta Kappa.
Teaching
VP Patel teaches one undergraduate accounting course in the AB School of Business each spring semester. She believes that "administrators who don't teach forget what the actual product is."
- ACC 312Nonprofit & Governmental AccountingAn applied junior-level course in fund accounting, FASB standards for not-for-profits, and the regulatory environment of higher education and church institutions.
Professional Practice
Patel is not a research scholar in the traditional sense; her professional output is the disciplined financial life of the University itself. Under her leadership AB has achieved its first five consecutive clean audits from BKD/FORVIS (now Forvis Mazars), completed the multi-year accounting restatement that resolved a 2018 issue inherited from prior administration, and stabilized the operating budget for the first time in a decade.
She has presented at the NACUBO national conference (2023) on small-college financial stewardship, and is a frequent guest lecturer at the Penn State Smeal MBA program on the topic of nonprofit financial leadership.
Selected Publications & Presentations
- 2023Plenary panelist, NACUBO Annual Meeting, "Stabilizing the Small Private College Budget."
- 2022Co-author, "Lessons From a Liquidity Crisis: A Case Study in Small-College Financial Recovery." Business Officer Magazine, October.
- 2020Guest lecturer, Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business, Nonprofit Finance seminar.
Honors & Service
- 2024NACUBO Innovation Award, Operational Efficiency category, for the AB Procurement Modernization Initiative.
- 2023Promoted to Vice President for Finance & Operations.
- 2019Pittsburgh Business Times "40 Under 40."
- 2017University of Pittsburgh Provost's Award for Operational Excellence.
A balanced budget is not a virtue in itself. But an out-of-balance budget is a slow-moving betrayal of every student who counted on the institution being here for the next four years.— Lauren D. Patel, CPA
Beyond the Classroom
Patel and her husband Anil — a hospitalist physician at the Davis Health System — moved to Philippi from Pittsburgh with their two children (now in second and fifth grade at Philippi Elementary). They are active at Calvary Baptist Church and have helped lead the Barbour County United Way annual campaign for three years running.
In her spare time Patel is a serious vegetable gardener (her 2025 tomato crop was 47 pounds), a long-distance cyclist who completed the C&O Canal Towpath end-to-end last summer, and a devoted Penn State football fan who has not missed a televised game since 2009.