Ultimate Block Party October 3, 2010
Distinguished Scientific Advisory Board for the Ultimate Block Party
CHAIRS:
Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek
(khirshp@temple.edu) is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Professor in the Department of Psychology at Temple University, where she serves as Director of the Infant Language Laboratory and Co-Founder of CiRCLE (The Center for Re-Imagining Children’s Learning and Education). Kathy received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. at University of Pennsylvania. Her research in the areas of early language development, literacy and infant cognition has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and Human Development resulting in 11 books and over 100 publications. She is a recipient of the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science, the Temple University’s Great Teacher Award and the Paul Eberman Research Award. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, served as the Associate Editor of Child Development and is treasurer of the International Association for Infant Studies. Her book, Einstein Never used Flashcards: How children really learn and why they need to play more and memorize less, (Rodale Books) won the prestigious Books for Better Life Award as the best psychology book in 2003. Kathy is deeply invested in bridging the gap between research and practice. To that end, she was a researchers on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, co-developed the language and literacy preschool curricula for the State of California and has consulted with toy companies and media programs like Sesame Workshop.
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff
(roberta@UDel.Edu) H. Rodney Sharp Professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware has joint appointments in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Her research focuses on how children learn language as well as on preschool education and the benefits of play. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical award, she has published 12 books, written over 100 papers, and presents the findings of her research all over the world. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. In September, she was awarded a stimulus grant from NIH to study preschoolers’ knowledge of geometric shapes and how having this information relates to mathematical ability.
Committed to disseminating the research labors of her field, she wrote (with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek), How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life (Penguin); Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less (Rodale) and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool (Oxford). In addition, she has written Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs and PLAY = LEARNING: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth, and (both Oxford). Dr. Golinkoff is also a spokesperson for research in developmental science, frequently giving interviews or writing essays for print outlets (such as the New York Times), online sites (such as Urban Baby), and electronic media (radio and television outlets such as Good Morning America) and is currently an Associate Editor of the journal Child Development.
In 2009, with her long-standing collaborator (Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek), Dr. Golinkoff won the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Service Award for “...disseminating and translating psychological research and making it accessible to policymakers and the general public through publications, public lectures and advisory roles with child-related organizations.”
COMMITTEE:
Lawrence Aber
(la39@nyu.edu )is a Professor of Applied Psychology and Public Policy at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University, where he also serves as Board Chair of its Institute for Human Development and Social Change. Dr. Aber earned his Ph.D. from Yale University and an A.B. from Harvard University. He previously taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, where he also directed the National Center for Children in Poverty. He is an internationally recognized expert in child development and social policy and has co-edited Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children (1997, Russell Sage Foundation), Assessing the Impact of September 11th 2001 on Children Youth and Parents: Lessons for Applied Developmental Science (2004, Erlbaum) and Child Development and Social Policy: Knowledge for Action (2007, APA Publications). His basic research examines the influence of poverty and violence, at the family and community levels, on the social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive and academic development of children and youth. Dr. Aber also designs and conducts rigorous evaluations of innovative programs and policies for children, youth and families, such as violence prevention, literacy development, antipoverty initiatives and comprehensive services initiatives. He has been a recipient of a William T. Grant Faculty Scholar award as well as a Visiting Scholar award from the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Aber testifies frequently before Congress, state legislatures and other deliberative policy forums. The media, public officials, private foundations and leading non-profit organizations also frequently seek his opinion or advice about pressing matters concerning child and family well-being. In 2006, Dr. Aber was appointed by the Mayor of New York City to the Commission for Economic Opportunity, an initiative to help reduce poverty and increase economic opportunity in New York City. In 2007, Dr. Aber served as the Nannerl O. Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2008 and 2009, he served part-time as Visiting Research Professor in Evidence-based Social Intervention in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Oxford. He is also Board Chair of the Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa; Chair of the Board of Directors of the Forum for Youth Investment in Washington, D.C.; and Board Member of the William T. Grant Foundation.
Laura Berk
(leberk@ilstu.edu) is a distinguished professor of psychology at Illinois State University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and has published widely on the effects of school environments on children’s development, the development of private speech, and most recently the role of make-believe play in development. Her empirical studies have attracted the attention of the general public, leading to contributions to Psychology Today and Scientific American. She has also been featured on National Public Ratio’s Morning Edition and in Parents Magazine, Wondertime, and Reader’s Digest.
Berk is the author of several widely distributed textbooks in human development, including Child Development (in its 8th edition), Infants, Children, and Adolescents (in its 6th edition), and Development Through the Lifespan (in its 5th edition), published by Allyn and Bacon. Her book for parents and teachers is Awakening Children’s Minds: How Parents and Teachers Can Make a Difference (Oxford University Press). She is a coauthor of A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence (Oxford University Press). She is associate editor of the Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology.
Berk is a member of the national board of directors of Jumpstart, a nonprofit organization that provides early literacy intervention to thousands of low-income preschoolers across the United States. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, Division 7: Developmental Psychology.
Patricia Bauer
(pjbauer@emory.edu) received her Ph.D. from Miami University in 1985 and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego from 1985 to 1989. She was on the faculty of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota from 1989 to 2005. After two years in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, she joined the faculty of Emory University in 2007. She serves as Senior Associate Dean for Research in Emory College, and is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Psychology. Her research focuses on the development of memory from infancy through childhood, with special emphasis on the determinants of remembering and forgetting; and links between social, cognitive, and neural developments and age-related changes in autobiographical or personal memory.
Clancy Blair
(cbb5@nyu.edu ) is a developmental psychologist who studies self-regulation in young children. His primary interest concerns the development of cognitive abilities referred to as executive functions and the ways in which these aspects of cognition are important for school readiness and early school achievement. He is also interested in the development and evaluation of preschool and elementary school curricula designed to promote executive functions as a means of preventing school failure. In 2002, Blair and his colleagues at Penn State University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for a longitudinal, population-based study of family ecology and child development beginning at birth. In his part of the project, Blair is examining interaction between early experiential and biological influences on the development of executive functions and related aspects of self-regulation. Ultimately, Blair and his colleagues plan to follow this sample through the school years and into young adulthood. Prior to coming to NYU, Blair spent ten years as an assistant and then associate professor in the department of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He received his doctorate in developmental psychology and a master's degree in public health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1996.
Elena Bedrova
(elena.theasis@gmail.com) is a Principal Researcher at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL). She is the lead author of Scaffolding Early Literacy, a program that combines high standards for developing young children’s cognition, language, and early literacy with professional development for teachers in essential knowledge and tools for effective pedagogy. She is also a co-author of Tools of the Mind, a curriculum for preschool and kindergarten-aged children that promotes school readiness by helping children become self-regulated learners. The effects of Tools of the Mind on brain development were documented by leading neuroscientists and reported in a recent (November 2007) article in Science magazine. Dr. Bodrova has served as the lead professional development provider for four Early Reading First projects in Wyoming, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana, and Florida. She is an internationally known expert in cognitive psychology and child development and has been teaching, providing professional development, and conducting research in early childhood education, early literacy, and assessment in the U.S. since 1992. At McREL since 1998, Dr. Bodrova has worked with adult learners in a variety of field sites, providing intensive, one-on-one coaching to teachers in their classrooms to establish “model classrooms” that serve as on-site training centers. She serves as a Research Fellow for the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). She publishes widely, including a defining book on Vygotsky’ theory of education Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education (2nd ed), chapter in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, 2nd Ed. (Neuman & Dickinson, Eds.) and a 2004 NAEYC publication, Basics of Assessment: A Primer for Early Childhood Professionals.
Stuart L. Brown, MD
(stuart@nifplay.org) trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry and clinical research, Stuart Brown first recognized the importance of play by discovering its absence in the life stories of murderers and felony drunken drivers. His years of clinical practice affirmed the importance and need for healthy play throughout the human life cycle, and his later evaluation of highly creative individuals revealed the centrality of playfulness to their success and well-being. His recent years of independent scholarship and exploration of the evolution of human and animal play have helped to focus a central commitment bringing the promises and stories of play into general cultural consciousness and to the establishment of the Institute For Play. The Mission of the Institute for Play (IFP) is to bring the unrealized knowledge, practices and benefits of play into public life Dr. Brown was the instigator and Executive Producer of the three-part PBS series, "The Promise of Play." His experience as medical administrator, producer, and scientific consultant or creator to numerous other productions on Joseph Campbell, Cosmology, Animal Play, plus his scientific and popular writings have identified him as the foremost "practical champion of the knowledge of play."
Virginia Casper
(vcasper@bankstreet.edu) is the Interim Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Bank Street College for the 2010-2011 academic year. She is a developmental psychologist by training and a teacher educator by trade, having worked with young children and families across a variety of settings in NYC and abroad. She directed the Infant and Family Development and Early Intervention Program for many years, and served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Bank Street Graduate School for five years. Her research has focused on issues of attachment, gender and parent-teacher relationships. Dr. Casper is the co-author of Gay Parents/Straight Schools: Building Communication and Trust- T.C. Press (1999) and Introduction to Early Childhood Education: Learning Together- McGraw-Hill (2009). She serves on the editorial board of Zero to Three Press and is a co- author of peer-reviewed journal articles in Harvard Educational Review and Teachers College Press. Dr. Casper also works in a community based participatory development project (Developing Families Project) that partners with South African rural NGO’s around improving birth-to-three group care.
James Davis
(james.earl.davis@temple.edu) focuses on gender and schooling outcomes; men, boys and masculinity; sociology of higher education; and applied research methods. I am particularly interested in issues of access and equity in the educational pipeline as they are informed by gender, race, class, and the intersection of these social locations. My work has appeared in various research journals, including the Gender & Society, Urban Education, American Journal of Evaluation, Peabody Journal of Education, Evaluation Review, and Educational Researcher. I am the author of African American Males in School and Society: Policies and Practices for Effective Education (with Vernon C. Polite) and Black Sons to Mothers: Compliments, Critiques, and Challenges for Cultural Workers in Education (with M. Christopher Brown). I am a former National Academy of Education-Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and I have been on the faculty at the University of Delaware and Cornell University. I have also been a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Research of Women and Gender at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and in the Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison. My work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Marcus Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Adele Diamond, Ph.D.
(adele.diamond@ubc.ca) is one of the few founders of the field of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. She holds the Canada Research Chair Tier 1 Professorship in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. Dr. Diamond is one of the world's leading researchers on the development of cognitive functions. From 1980, she has been studying these functions from their earliest beginnings in infancy throughout the lifespan in clinical and typical populations. Her research on the genetic disorder, PKU (phenylketonuria) changed medical guidelines worldwide.
Executive function (EF) skills, such as inhibitory control (including selective attention and discipline), working memory, and cognitive flexibility, are critical for success in school and life. Her group demonstrated that EF can be improved in at-risk preschoolers in regular public-school classrooms, without specialists or special equipment. Children who spent more time engaged in mature play showed better academic outcomes than those who spent more time in direct academic instruction.
Dr. Diamond has spoken to groups all over world including a conference on Educating the Heart with the Dalai Lama.
David Dickinson
(david.dickinson@vanderbilt.edu) is professor and interim Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University's Peabody School of Education. Professor Dickinson is interested in the home and classroom factors that support children's acquisition of language and literacy abilities. His work addresses both basic questions about the role of language in literacy and in practical questions about strategies for improving the literacy-learning opportunities of children. Basic research questions that he studies relate to the role of language development in the consolidation of young children's linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities in fostering literacy growth. Professor Dickinson's applied interests include efforts to identify strategies that result in enhanced learning and in work developing techniques and systems for delivering materials and professional development to teachers that are effective and cost effective.
Susan Engel
(Susan.L.Engel@williams.edu) is Senior Lecturer in Psychology, and Class of 1959 Director of the Program in Teaching at Williams College. Her research has focused on the emergence of narratives, children’s autobiographical memory, imaginative processes in childhood, and the development of curiosity. Her work appears in chapters and articles for scientific publications, and she has also written for teachers and parents. She has published three books, and her fourth, Red Flags or Red Herrings will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2011. She is the co-founder of an experimental school in New York State, where she oversaw all aspects of educational practice, including developing curriculum and supervising the teachers for 14 years. In 2007/8 she published a series of columns in the New York Times describing how teachers solve problems, and in 2009/10 she published two op-ed pieces in the New York Times, one on teacher education, the other on curriculum.
Ellen Galinsky
(emgalinsky@gmail.com) Ellen Galinsky, President and Co-Founder of Families and Work Institute, helped establish the field of work and family life at Bank Street College of Education, where she was on the faculty for twenty-five years. Her more than forty books and reports include Ask The Children, the now-classic The Six Stages of Parenthood, and http://theharperstudiobooks.com/mind-in-the-making/Mind in the Making, to be published by HarperStudio in April 2010.
At FWI, she co-directs the National Study of the Changing Workforce, the most comprehensive ongoing nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce, the National Study of Employers, an ongoing nationally representative study tracking trends in employment benefits, policies and practices as well as When Work Works, a project on workplace flexibility and effectiveness. Ms. Galinsky directs Mind in the Making, a project on the science of early learning that includes the book, videos for teachers, and learning modules for teachers and for families.
She has received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the 2004 Distinguished Achievement Award from Vassar College. She served as the elected President of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources in 2005. She holds a Masters in Child Development/ Education from Bank Street College of Education and a BA degree in Child Study from Vassar College. She was a presenter at the White House Conference on Child Care in 1997 and on Teenagers in 2000 and is featured regularly in the media, including appearances on Today, World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, and Oprah.
Herbert P. Ginsburg
(ginsburg@tc.columbia.edu) is Jacob H. Schiff Foundation Professor of Herbert Ginsburg, Ph.D., is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has written, with Sylvia Opper, a widely used introduction to Piaget’s theory, as well as an introduction to clinical interviewing, Entering the Child’s Mind. His research interests include the development of mathematical thinking (with particular attention to young children and disadvantaged populations) and the assessment of cognitive function. He has conducted basic research on the development of mathematical thinking, and has developed mathematics curricula and storybooks for young children, tests of mathematical thinking, and video workshops to enhance teachers’ understanding of students’ learning of mathematics. Currently he is exploring how computer technology can be used to promote in-service professional development, to help teachers assess children's mathematical knowledge, and to foster young children’s (from 3 years to grade 3) mathematics learning. He has served as a consultant for Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues, Reading Rainbow, and a new show, Umizoomis.
Alison Gopnik
is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. Her honors include a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada University Research Fellowship, an Osher Visiting Scientist Fellowship at the Exploratorium, a Center for the Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship, and a Moore Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She was one of the founders of the study of "theory of mind", illuminating how children come to understand the minds of others, and she formulated the "theory theory", the idea that children’s learn in the same way that scientists do.
She is the author of over 100 articles and several books including "Words, thoughts and theories" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997, "The Scientist in the Crib" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999, and the just published "The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life" Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009. "The Scientist in the Crib" was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, was translated into 20 languages and was enthusiastically reviewed in Science, The New Yorker, the Washington Post and The New York Review of Books (among others). She has also written for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, and Slate.
She has spoken extensively on children’s minds including keynote speeches to political organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Development, children’s advocacy organizations including Parents as Teachers and Zero to Three, museums including The Exploratorium, The Chicago Children’s Museum, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and science organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Psychological Association, the Association of Psychological Science, and the American Philosophical Association. She has also appeared on Charlie Rose, Nova, and many NPR radio programs. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California.
Lilian Katz
(lgkatz@illinois.edu) is Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and is currently Co-Director of the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting (CEEP) at the University of Illinois. She is a Past President of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and the first President of the Illinois Association for the Education of Young Children. Dr. Katz is Editor of the first on-line peer reviewed bilingual early childhood journal, Early Childhood Research & Practice.
Professor Katz is author of more than one hundred publications including articles, chapters, and books about early childhood education, teacher education, child development, and parenting of young children. Dr. Katz was founding editor of the Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and served as Editor-in-Chief during its first six years. Her most recent book (co-authored with J. H. Helm) is Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years. Her book titled Talks with Teachers of Young Children (1995) is a collection of her best known early essays and several more recent ones. In 2000 she published the second edition of Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach, co-authored with S. C. Chard. It has been translated into several languages, as have many of her other works.
Patricia K. Kuhl
(pkkuhl@u.washington.edu) is the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair for Early Childhood Learning, Co-Director of the UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, Director of the University of Washington's NSF Science of Learning Center, and Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences. She is internationally recognized for her research on early language and brain development, and studies that show how young children learn. Dr. Kuhl's work has played a major role in demonstrating how early exposure to language alters the brain. It has implications for critical periods in development, for bilingual education and reading readiness, for developmental disabilities involving language, and for research on computer understanding of speech.
Dr. Kuhl is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Rodin Academy, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1997, and in 2005, the Kenneth Craik Research Award from Cambridge University. She received the University of Washington's Faculty Lectureship Award in 1998, and in the 2007, Dr. Kuhl was awarded the University of Minnesota's Outstanding Achievement Award. Dr. Kuhl is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Psychological Society. In 2008 in Paris, Dr. Kuhl was awarded the Gold Medal from the acoustics branch of the American Institute of Physics for her work on learning and the brain.
Dr. Kuhl was one of six scientists invited to the White House in 1997 to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Clinton's Conference on "Early Learning and the Brain." In 2001, she was invited to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Bush's White House Summit on "Early Cognitive Development: Ready to Read, Ready to Learn." In 1999, she co-authored The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn (Morrow Press).
Dr. Kuhl's work has been widely covered by the media. She has appeared in the Discovery television series "The Baby Human"; the NOVA series "The Mind"; the "The Power of Ideas" on PBS; and "The Secret Life of the Brain," also on PBS. She has discussed her research findings on early learning and the brain on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, NHK, CNN, and in The New York Times, Time, and Newsweek
Susan Levine
(s-levine@uchicago.edu) received her B.A. with honors from Simmons College in 1972, majoring in Psychology, Mathematics and Education and her Ph.D. in Psychology from M.I.T. in 1976. She joined the faculty at the University of Chicago that year. Professor Levine is co-director of the Center for Early Childhood Research and serves as the chair of the Department of Psychology
Dr. Levine’s research focuses on early spatial, math, and language skills in typically developing children and children with early focal brain injury. She is particularly interested in how input supports cognitive development. Recent research also examines how adults may convey their domain anxieties to children and impact children’s achievement in those domains.
Lynn S. Liben
(liben@psu.edu) is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Pennsylvania State University at University Park where she also holds faculty appointments in Human Development and Family Studies and in the College of Education. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Cornell, and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. For over a decade she was Head of the Psychology Department at Penn State where she also served as the Founding Director of the Child Study Center. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Child Development and the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and is on the editorial boards of a number of other leading journals. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the American Educational Research Association, and is former President of Division 7 of APA (Developmental Psychology) and of the Jean Piaget Society.
Dr. Liben’s research focuses on children’s developing understanding of spatial representations such as maps and photographs and on why even some adults continue to have difficult using them. She has been especially interested in how parents and teachers may help to encourage their children's spatial thinking, contributing to the National Research Council's report on Spatial Thinking. She has used her research to help design educational programming in various contexts including children’s television (e.g., Sesame Street), magazines (e.g., Highlights for Children), museums (e.g., The Children's Museum of Indianapolis), and classroom instruction in geography and geology. A second focus of Dr. Liben=s work is on the development of gender and racial stereotypes, including ways in which these stereotypes may affect children=s educational and occupational choices. Her work at the intersection of the domains of space and gender includes the study of sex-related differences in spatial skills and of the gender gap in performance on the annual National Geographic Bee. Dr. Liben has authored or co-authored over 125 articles and authored or edited 9 books on these topics; funding for her research has come from the National Science Foundation, NICCHD, the National Geographic Society, the National Institute of Education, and the Social Science Research Council.
Angeline Lillard
(asl2h@virginia.edu)
Angeline Lillard is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. She received her doctorate in Psychology from Stanford University in 1991, where she worked with John Flavell on children's theories of mind. Much of her research has concerned pretend play, and she also addresses issues related to Montessori education, culture, and neuroplasticity. She was awarded the Developmental Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association's Outstanding Dissertation Award in 1992 and its Boyd McCandless Award for Distinguished Early Career Contribution in 1999. She is a 2005-6 recipient of a James McKeen Cattell sabbatical award, and her book Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius was selected by the Cognitive Development Society as the Best Book for 2006. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and she has been a keynote speaker at Psychology conferences in Ireland, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Canada, and Great Britain.
Nora S. Newcombe
(Newcombe@temple.edu) is Professor of Psychology and James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. Her Ph.D. is from Harvard University. Her research focuses on spatial cognition and development, including the nature of gender differences in spatial ability. She is also interested in the development of autobiographical and episodic memory. Dr. Newcombe is the author of numerous chapters, articles, and books, including Making Space with Janellen Huttenlocher (published by the MIT Press, 2000). Her work has been recognized by several awards, including the George A. Miller Award and the G. Stanley Hall Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She has served as Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and Associate Editor of Psychological Bulletin, as well as on many grant panels and advisory boards. She is currently Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, whose mission is to understand human spatial cognition, with an emphasis on the idea that spatial knowledge and skills can be improved, and to apply the resulting knowledge to foster spatial learning, especially in STEM disciplines.
Peter A. Ornstein
(pao@unc.edu) is the F. Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A developmental psychologist, Dr. Ornstein's research concerns cognitive development, especially the development of young children's memory. Two programs of research focus on social factors – such as interactions with parents and teachers – that influence developmental changes in children’s abilities to remember. In the first of these programs, Dr. Ornstein is working with Dr. Jennifer Coffman to examine the ways in which teachers in the early elementary school years facilitate the emergence and refinement of children's deliberate memory strategies. This project entails longitudinal assessments of children’s mnemonic skills, as well as detailed observations in the classrooms of these children. In the second research program, Dr. Ornstein collaborates with Dr. Catherine Haden on a longitudinal study of the development of children’s memory over the first six years of life, focusing on transitions from early expressions of nonverbal memory to later uses of language to make reference to past experiences to still later facility in the deliberate deployment of strategies for remembering. Particular emphasis is placed on parent-child social interaction as it impacts children’s developing skills in talking about previously-experienced events. Moreover, in a third program of research, Dr. Ornstein works with Dr. Lynne Baker Ward (and previously with their late colleague, Dr. Betty Gordon) to examine the abilities of 3- to 7-year-olds to remember salient personal experiences – such visits to the doctor – over extended periods of time. These studies are designed to contribute to an understanding of the major factors (e.g., prior knowledge, stress) that influence children's memory performance and its development, but they also have implications for assessing the abilities of young children to provide accurate testimony in legal situations. Finally, Dr. Ornstein collaborates with Dr. Martha Cox and CDS faculty colleagues on an integrated multi-level longitudinal investigation of children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development, the Durham Child Health and Development Study.
Laura Petitto
(petitto@utsc.utoronto.ca) is a Cognitive Neuroscientist and Full Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Graduate Studies Program at the University of Toronto (Scarborough/St. George), and the University of Toronto Neuroscience Program. She is also the Director and Senior Scientist of the “Genes, Mind & fNIRS Brain Imaging Laboratory for Language, Bilingualism, and Child Development.” Dr. Petitto is known for her research on the biological bases of language, be it signed or spoken, and for her cross-species research to explore the nature of language and “mind” in Chimpanzees (“Project NIM Chimpsky,” Columbia University, New York). She is also known for her commitment to bridging discoveries in the science lab with prevailing problems in contemporary education in principled ways, and, towards this end, for her pioneering role in the creation of a new scientific discipline that promotes such efforts, called “Educational Neuroscience.” Presently, Dr. Petitto studies adults, children, and infants during language processing, especially early childhood bilingual language acquisition, using a revolutionary combination of three disciplines: Genetic analyses, Behavioral measures, and powerful new Brain Imaging, functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). Petitto is the recipient of esteemed research awards, including the “Canadian Foundation for Innovation” involving funding to establish her Genes, Mind, and Brain research laboratory, the first of its kind in Canada, and is also funded by the United States’ National Institutes of Health (R01 and R21). Other significant Foundation funding includes grants from The Dana Foundation for the Arts (in which she examined the impact of training in the Arts on children’s acquisition of other non-Arts knowledge) and The Spencer Foundation (“Major Research Grant,” in which she conducted first-time studies on the normal/typical language milestones in children with bilingual language exposure). Petitto received her Masters and Doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1981 and 1984 (respectively) and built a vibrant laboratory in Cognitive Neuroscience, first, at McGill University (1983-2001, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) and then at Dartmouth College (2001-2007, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA), where she was also Chair for 5 years of a newly conceived department that she designed and helped to launch, called the Department of Educational Neuroscience and Development. Petitto is the recipient of over twenty international prizes and awards for her scientific achievements, including the 1998 Guggenheim Award for her “unusually distinguished achievements in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment in the discipline of Neuroscience.” In February, 2009, she was appointed a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as well the American Psychological Association (APS).
Mitchel Resnick
(mres@media.mit.edu), LEGO Professor of Learning Research and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Laboratory, explores how new technologies can engage people in creative learning experiences. Resnick's research group developed the "programmable brick" technology that inspired the LEGO MindStorms robotics kit and the PicoCricket artistic-invention kit. He co-founded the target="new">Computer Clubhouse project, a worldwide network of after-school centers where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Recently, Resnick's group developed Scratch, an online community where children program and share interactive stories, games, and animations. Resnick earned a BA in physics at Princeton University (1978), and MS and PhD degrees in computer science at MIT (1988, 1992). He worked as a science-technology journalist from 1978 to 1983, and he has consulted throughout the world on creative uses of computers in education. He is author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (1994), co-editor of Constructionism in Practice (1996), and co-author of Adventures in Modeling (2001) Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Professor of Learning Research and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Laboratory, explores how new technologies can engage people in creative learning experiences. Resnick's research group developed the "programmable brick" technology that inspired the LEGO MindStorms robotics kit and the PicoCricket artistic-invention kit. He co-founded the target="new">Computer Clubhouse project, a worldwide network of after-school centers where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Recently, Resnick's group developed Scratch, an online community where children program and share interactive stories, games, and animations. Resnick earned a BA in physics at Princeton University (1978), and MS and PhD degrees in computer science at MIT (1988, 1992). He worked as a science-technology journalist from 1978 to 1983, and he has consulted throughout the world on creative uses of computers in education. He is author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (1994), co-editor of Constructionism in Practice (1996), and co-author of Adventures in Modeling (2001).
Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D
(jack_shonkoff@gse.harvard.edu) is the Julius B. Richmond FAMRI Professor of Child Health and Development at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Graduate School of Education, and founding director of the university-wide Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. He also chairs the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a multi-university collaboration comprising leading scholars in neuroscience, developmental psychology, pediatrics, and economics, whose mission is to bring sound and accurate science to bear on public decision-making affecting the lives of young children. Dr Shonkoff has received multiple professional honors, including elected membership to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, elected membership to the American Pediatric Society, designated National Associate of the National Academies, the C. Anderson Aldrich Award in Child Development from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy for Children from the Society for Research in Child Development. Under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Shonkoff chaired the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development for the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, which produced a landmark report entitled From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Prior to assuming his current position, he was the Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and Dean of The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University
Dorothy G. Singer
(dorothy.singer@yale.edu) is Senior Research Scientist Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Yale University. She is also Co-Director of the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center; Fellow, Morse College; and Fellow of The American Psychological Association. She co-directs the Electronic Media and Families Unit of the Zigler Center. Her research interests include early childhood development and television effects on youth. She consults with parent groups, television industry personnel and government agencies concerning television and education. She has written and developed parent and teacher training materials for day care centers and media literacy materials for educating children to be critical users of television. She has consulted with LeapFrog, National Geographic, LEGO, Stepping Stones Museum in Norwalk, CT, the Peabody Museum, Children’s Museum of Manhattan, and the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian. Dr. Singer was given the Distinguished Contribution to the Science of Psychology Award by the Connecticut Psychology Association in 1997 and the award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to the Media by Division 46 of the American Psychological Association in 2004. She also received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2006. In 2009 she received the Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Media Psychology from the American Psychological Association.
Selected Book Titles
Make- Believe: Games and Activities to Foster Imaginative Play in Children;
Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age;
The House of Make- Believe: Children's Play and the Developing Imagination;
A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks
Edited Book Titles
Play=Learning;
Children's Play: The Roots of Reading;
Handbook of Children and the Media;
Handbook of Children, Culture and Violence
Laurence Steinberg
(lds@temple.edu), Ph.D. , is the Distinguished University Professor and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology at Temple University. Dr. Steinberg has taught previously at Cornell University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was educated at Vassar College and at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 1977. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, has been a Faculty Scholar of the William T. Grant Foundation, and was Director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. Dr. Steinberg is Past-President of the Division of Developmental Psychology of the American Psychological Association and a former President of the Society for Research on Adolescence. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the John P. Hill Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Adolescence, the American Psychological Association Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society, the Society for Adolescent Medicine's Gallagher Lectureship, the American Psychological Association Presidential Citation, and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy. Dr. Steinberg also has been recognized for excellence in research and teaching by the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, and Temple University, where he was honored as one of the university's Great Teachers.
A nationally and internationally renowned expert on psychological development during adolescence, Dr. Steinberg's research has focused on a range of topics in the study of contemporary adolescence, including adolescent brain development, risk-taking and decision-making, parent-adolescent relationships, adolescent employment, high school reform, and juvenile justice. His work has been funded by a variety of public and private organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Justice, the MacArthur Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Spencer Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Dr. Steinberg served as a member of the National Academies’ Panel on the Health Implications of Child Labor; Committee on the Science of Adolescent Health and Development; and Board on Children, Youth, and Families, and currently chairs the Committee on the Science of Adolescence. He has been a frequent consultant to state and federal agencies and lawmakers on child labor, secondary education, and juvenile justice policy and was the lead scientist on the amicus curiae brief filed by the American Psychological Association in Roper v. Simmons, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that abolished the juvenile death penalty. He has also provided expert testimony and consultation in a number of legal cases involving adolescent brain and behavioral development.
Dr. Steinberg is the author of more than 250 articles and essays on growth and development during the teenage years, and the author or editor of eleven books, including Adolescence (McGraw-Hill), the leading college textbook on adolescent development, now in its 8th edition; When Teenagers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment (with Ellen Greenberger; Basic Books); You and Your Adolescent: A Parent's Guide for Ages 10 to 20 (with Ann Levine; HarperCollins); Crossing Paths: How Your Child's Adolescence Triggers Your Own Crisis (with Wendy Steinberg; Simon & Schuster), Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do (with Bradford Brown and Sanford Dornbusch; Simon & Schuster), Studying Minority Adolescents: Conceptual, Methodological, and Theoretical Issues (co-edited with Vonnie McLoyd; Erlbaum), the Handbook of Adolescent Psychology (co-edited with Richard Lerner; Wiley), Rethinking Juvenile Justice (with Elizabeth Scott; Harvard University Press), Development: Infancy Through Adolescence (with Deborah Vandell and Marc Bornstein; Wadsworth), and The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting (Simon & Schuster), which has been translated into ten languages. Dr. Steinberg is a frequent consultant on adolescent development for print and electronic media, including The New York Times and National Public Radio. He has also has written for many popular outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
Paula A. Tallal, Ph.D
tallal@andromeda.rutgers.edu) a director of Scientific Learning Corporation, is also a Board of Governors’ professor of neuroscience at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where she helped found and currently co-directs the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience.
Tallal is a cognitive neuroscientist and board-certified clinical psychologist who has authored over 200 professional publications and holds several patents.
She was selected by the Library of Congress to be the Commentator for the Field of Psychology at its Bicentennial Celebration and earned the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Prize for her work leading to the development of Fast ForWord software.
Tallal received her bachelor’s degree from NYU and her Ph.D. from Cambridge. She is also a participant in many scientific advisory boards and governmental committees on developmental language disorders and learning disabilities.
Catherine Tamis-LeMonda
(catherine.tamis-lemonda@nyu.edu), NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; Professor of Applied Psychology. Catherine’s research is focused on the cultural and social contexts of language, cognitive and social development in infants' first years of life. How do infants' interactions with mothers, fathers and other members of their families and social networks affect their learning trajectories and later school readiness? How might paths to developmental outcomes differ across communities that vary in cultural priorities and parenting practices? Through longitudinal inquiry Catherine follows infants from birth through preschool, visiting babies and families in their homes, schools and communities using naturalistic observations, interviews and direct assessments of development. Her lab’s goal is to advance a richer understanding of how learning unfolds in different cultural and ethnic groups in the U.S. as well as internationally. This naturalistic research is coupled with laboratory investigations (with colleague Karen Adolph), in which we also examine how infants come to understand and recognize that others are useful sources of social information. Infants are tested in novel locomotor situations, where we examine their bids to others for assistance and information about how to act under situations of uncertainty and risk. Together, the work Catherine conducts in naturalistic and laboratory settings promises to inform theories about the ways in which infants and parents negotiate meaning through everyday social exchanges.
Christopher W. Tyler, Ph.D
(cwt@ski.org), Having completed his education in England, Christopher has spent the past three decades in the United States exploring the processes of human vision. Christopher has long been fascinated with the question of how the eyes and brain work together to produce sight. In order for us to see, the light that enters the eye must be converted into a stream of nerve impulses to transmit the eye's picture to the brain. The nerve impulses contain the information about the brightness, color, shape, movement, and distance of the objects in the world. Most of his research has focused on these basic components of visual perception.
Since the human brain operates like an electrical system, his approach has been to apply techniques from electrical engineering to the study of vision. From color to motion to 3-D vision, Christopher has introduced engineering concepts to describe the speed and capabilities of the visual system, with its exquisite sensitivity to subtle visual changes.
Christopher began research on eye diseases at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, England, with the study of flicker sensitivity in glaucoma. With careful new design, this proved to form a more sensitive test of the effects of glaucoma than any current clinical test. It can therefore assist medical professionals to diagnose glaucoma as early as possible, and thus avoid further loss of vision. The same test has generated important information about several other eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and other retinal and optic nerve disorders.
Dr. Tyler’s work with electrical brain potentials has revealed a rich complexity in the responses to simple stimuli, implying that we could record many different brain circuits from outside the head.
His lab has developed a rapid method of recording brain responses across a wide range of conditions (the "sweep VEP"), which could then be used to study infant vision. The short recording time required by this new method allowed him to measure visual development with great accuracy. He has found that infants can see much better at birth than previously suspected, and have close to adult vision by about eight months of age (although they may not fully "understand" what they see at this age). He can also detect the effects of poor eye coordination more readily than could previous techniques, and help physicians to refine the treatment of infant eye problems.
Dr. Tyler’s studies of retinal diseases have raised questions about how light is turned into electrical energy in the receptors of the retina (rods and cones). His lab is now exploring the extremely rapid reactions taking place in the first few milliseconds after light hits the photoreceptors. Much of what happens in the photoreceptors controls the rest of vision, so it is important to have a thorough understanding of these early events before the rest can be properly studied. For example, vision in the periphery is much faster than in direct view, but this can probably be explained by the structure of the retinal receptors, with profound implications for later brain processing.
Christopher’s current interests include mathematical modeling of 3-D stereoscopic depth and pattern perception (texture and symmetry, in particular) by means of matrix arrays representing various types of cortical receptive field properties. This will allow him to design stimuli to probe specific neural sub-populations and explore their properties in the human brain.
Ellen Winner
(Winner@bc.edu) is Professor of Psychology at Boston College, and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 1978 working with Roger Brown on child metaphor. Her research focuses on cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children. She is the author of over 100 articles and four books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts (Harvard University Press, 1982); The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony (Harvard University Press, 1988); Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (BasicBooks, 1997, translated into six languages and winner of the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Science); and Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (Teachers College Press, 2007, co-authored with Lois Hetland, Shirley Veenema, and Kimberly Sheridan).
She received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from the American Psychological Association. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 10, Psychology and the Arts) and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.
