OUR ADVISORY BOARD
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Sharon Solloway, Ph.D.
Sharon G. Solloway is an educator whose teaching focuses on mindset orientations and mindfulness practice. She is a professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. She earned her doctorate at Oklahoma State University. She developed the Solloway Mindfulness Survey and collaborated with Lectica to develop the Lectical Solloway Mindfulness Assessment and the Solloway Mindfulness Journal. She implements mindful pedagogy as a strategy for balance and clarity in the classroom. Her career as an educator includes fourteen years as a first grade teacher.
Kurt W. Fischer, Ph.D.
Kurt Fischer is the Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program and the Charles Warland Bigelow Professor of Education and Human Development at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D in Social relations from Harvard University. Kurt Fischer leads an international movement to connect biology and cognitive science to education, and is founding editor of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education (Blackwell), which received the award for Best New Journal by the Association of American Publishers. His research focuses on cognition, emotion, and learning and their relation to biological development and educational assessment. In his research he has discovered a general scale that provides tools for assessing learning and development in any domain. Among his other discoveries are that people move through different learning pathways while at the same time they show common (universal) processes of learning and development. more
Dr. Fischer has been visiting professor or visiting scholar at University of Geneva (Switzerland), University of Pennsylvania, University of Groningen (Netherlands), Nanjing Normal University (China), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), honorary professor at East China Normal University, and other universities around the world. He is author of “Dynamic Development of Action, Thought, and Emotion” in the Handbook of Child Psychology, Human Behavior and the Developing Brain, Mind, Brain, and Education in Reading Disorders, and a dozen other books, as well as over 250 scientific articles. He is knowledgeable about the diversity of learning pathways, methods for assessing them, and the ways that practice and policy can be shaped by research.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.D.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.D. is an affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist who studies the neural, psychophysiological and psychological bases of social emotion, self-awareness and culture and their implications for development and schools. She is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Rossier School of Education, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program Faculty at the University of Southern California. Dr. Immordino-Yang earned her doctorate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, where she was the recipient of grants from the Spencer Foundation and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. She was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at USC under the mentorship of Robert Rueda and Antonio Damasio. Dr. Immordino-Yang has an NSF CAREER award and is the inaugural recipient of the Award for Transforming Education through Neuroscience. She and her co-authors received the 2010 Cozzarelli Prize from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences for the most distinguished paper of the year in the behavioral and social sciences category, for the paper, "Neural correlates of admiration and compassion." PNAS, 106(19), 8021-8026. more
In 2011 she was named a "Rising Star" by the Association for Psychological Science, and received a Commendation from the County of Los Angeles for commitment to translational research in neuroscience and education. Immordino-Yang is the Associate Editor for North America for the award-winning journal Mind, Brain and Education. She is on the editorial boards of Journal of Experimental Psychology and Culture and Brain. She was elected to the governing board of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society, and serves on multiple school/educational advisory boards, among them Long Trail School (in VT), the Ross School Innovation Lab: Science, Math and Engineering Academy (in NY), and the University of New Mexico Family Development Program. She lectures nationally and abroad on the neural and psychosocial implications of brain and cognitive science research for curriculum and pedagogy. She is the content director for a new online, free course for teachers on learning and the brain, funded by the Annenberg Media Foundation: www.learner.org/courses/neuroscience.
Antonio Battro, MD, Ph.D.
Antonio M. Battro, Chief Education Officer, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child is an internationally acclaimed physician, professor, and psychologist. He received his M.D. from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and his PhD from Paris University (France) and completed post-doctoral training at University of Fribourg (Switzerland). His scientific work ranges from the development of basic cognitive and perceptual processes in children and moral development in childhood to the deployment of computers and communication devices in education in developing countries. Dr. Battro is also a founding contributor to the emerging field of mind, brain and education, with work on the unfolding of new digital skills in the developing brain. In his role at One Laptop per Child, he is actively promoting the use of computers by students and teachers of elementary schools around the world. more
Dr. Battro has held numerous fellowships and teaching appointments around the world, including at Centre International d'Epistemologie Genetique, Geneva (1967-68); Guggenheim Fellow, Brain Research Laboratories, New York Medical College (1968); Fulbright Fellow, Project Man and Biosphere, UNESCO, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2002). Dr. Battro is the author of eight books and many articles on education, neuroscience, and psychology.
Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.
Michael F. Mascolo is Professor of Psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D from the University at Albany (State University of New York) and completed post-doctoral training at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. His work is directed toward elaborating an integrative Coactive Systems Approach to psychological development. His research interests include the development of thinking, feeling and acting across the lifespan; the epigenetic and coactive nature of human development; the development of selfhood in socio-cultural context; the development of self-evaluative and moral emotions; how psychotherapy works as a developmental process; the development of love and sexuality; teaching and learning in higher education; and the development of everyday skills. Dr. Mascolo is the author or editor of several books and numerous articles, book chapters and papers on issues related to human development. more
Dr. Mascolo is the founding editor of Pedagogy and the Human Sciences (www.pedagogyandhumanscience.org) and the senior editor and contributor to North Shore Children & Families, a monthly parenting newspaper for families on Boston’s north shore (www.northshorefamilies.com). He teaches a range of courses related to human development, culture and social relationships, including Developmental Psychology; The Development of Intelligence and Thinking; Social and Personality Development; Cultural Psychology, and Love, Sex, and Relationships. He also teaches a senior-level internship course on Ethnographic Methods in the Study of Human Action and Experience, and a first-year interdisciplinary seminar called Tools for an Examined Life, which is devoted to fostering the development of higher-order reading, writing and critical thinking skills.
Alden S. Blodget, B.A., M.F.A
Alden S. Blodget is director of Heads Up Collaborative, which works to align school practices and structures with insights into how people learn. He was a secondary school teacher and administrator for 38 years and spent those years deeply involved in the movement to improve education. He taught theatre and English, created and chaired the arts department at Taft School (Connecticut), chaired the arts department at Packer Collegiate Institute (New York) and was assistant head of school for 18 years at Lawrence Academy (Massachusetts). Since 2000, he has worked with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (neuroscientist at USC) creating workshops for teachers to explore the implications of her research for the classroom. He was lead writer for Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections, an online course created for the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Center and funded by the Annenberg Foundation, on whose site the course is available. more
Mr. Blodget has written many articles for Independent School magazine (National Association of Independent Schools publication) and other publications. His booklet, Learning vs. Schooling: A Parent's Guide to Brain Research is available from Amazon Kindle. He has served on the Board of Trustees for The Long Trail School in Vermont, is a member of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society and is a guardian ad litem for the Family and Criminal Courts of Rutland County (Vermont), representing abused and delinquent children. As a member of the Lectica advisory board, he offers guidance on working within secondary schools and with school administrators and teachers.