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LIFE Executive Management Team
Patricia K. Kuhl, Ph.D., PI and Director
The Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair for Early Childhood Learning
Co-Director of Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS)
Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences
University of Washington
Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl 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).
John Bransford, Ph.D., Co-PI and Co-Director
James W. Mifflin University Professor of Education and Psychology
University of Washington
Author of seven books and hundreds of articles and presentations, Dr. John Bransford is an internationally renowned scholar in cognition and technology. Prior to his work at the University of Washington, Dr. Bransford was Centennial Professor of Psychology and Education and Co-Director of the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University. Early works by Bransford and his colleagues in the 1970s included research in the areas of human learning, memory and problem solving, which helped shape the “cognitive revolution” in psychology.
In 1984, Dr. Bransford was asked by the Dean of Peabody College at Vanderbilt to help begin a Learning Technology Center that would focus on education. The Center grew from 7 people in 1984 to approximately 100 by 1999. During that time, Bransford and his colleagues developed and tested a number of innovative computer, videodisc, CD-Rom, and Internet programs for mathematics, science, and literacy that are now being used in schools throughout the world. The Little Planet Literacy Series has won major awards including the 1996 Technology and Learning Award and the 1997 Cody award for Best Elementary Curriculum from the Software Publishers Association. Dr. Bransford received the Sutherland Prize for Research at Vanderbilt, was elected to the National Academy of Education, and was awarded the Thorndike award in 2001.
Dr. Bransford also served as Co-Chair of several National Academy of Science committees. These committees wrote How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005), How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (1999, 2000), and How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (1999). He is on the International and United States Board of Advisors for Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program, and he has worked with the Gates Foundation to develop technology-enhanced workshops that link learning and leadership.
Dan Schwartz, Ph.D., Co-PI and Co-Director
Director of AAA Lab
Professor of Education
Stanford University
A member of the SUSE faculty since 2000, Dr. Schwartz studies student understanding and representation and the ways that technology can facilitate learning. He works at the intersection of cognitive science, computer science, and education, examining cognition and instruction in individual, cross-cultural, and technological settings. A theme throughout Dr. Schwartz’s research is how people’s facility for spatial thinking can inform and influence processes of learning, instruction, assessment and problem solving. He finds that new media make it possible to exploit spatial representations and activities in fundamentally new ways, offering an exciting complement to the verbal approaches that dominate educational research and practice.
Dr. Schwartz’s current interest is in the creation and use of web-based tools for instruction. This research examines issues of transfer and how people move from untutored mental models to more formal and verbal understanding in the domains of mathematics, mechanics, and biology. Dr. Schwartz’s work employs laboratory and computer-modeling methodologies, as well as classroom interventions that involve the use of instructional software programs that he has co-authored including STAR: Legacy and Teachable Agents.
Andrew Meltzoff, Ph.D., Co-PI
Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair
Co-Director of Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS)
Professor of Psychology
University of Washington
Dr. Andrew Meltzoff is an internationally renowned expert on infant and child development whose discoveries about infant imitation have revolutionized our understanding of early cognition, personality, and brain development. His research on the effects of television viewing on infants has helped shape policy and practice.
Dr. Meltzoff’s 20 years of research on young children has had far-reaching implications for cognitive science, especially for ideas about memory and its development; for brain science, especially for ideas about common coding of perception and action and “mirror neurons”; and for early education and parenting, particularly for ideas about the importance of role models, both adults and peers, in child development.
Dr. Meltzoff is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health. In 2005, he was the recipient of an award for outstanding research from the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and the Kenneth Craik Award in Psychology, Cambridge University, England. Dr. Meltzoff has been inducted into the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, is the recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society.
Roy Pea, D.Phil.,Oxon., Co-PI
Co-Director of H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research and Director of Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning
Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences
Stanford University
Since 1981, Dr. Roy Pea has been exploring how information technologies can support and advance learning and teaching, with particular focus on topics in science, mathematics, and technology education. He has published widely on such topics as distributed cognition, learning and education fostered by advanced technologies including scientific visualization, on-line communities, digital video collaboratories, and wireless handheld computers (http://www.stanford.edu/~roypea). His current work is developing a new paradigm for everyday networked video interactions for learning and communications (http://diver.stanford.edu), and for how informal and formal learning can be better understood and connected, as Co-PI of the LIFE Center funded by the National Science Foundation as one of several large-scale national Science of Learning Centers. He is co-editor of the 2007 volume Video Research in the Learning Sciences. He was co-author of the 2000 National Academy Press volume “How People Learn.” Roy founded and served as the first director of the learning sciences doctoral programs at Northwestern University (1991) and Stanford University (2001). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Education, Association for Psychological Science, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the American Educational Research Association. In 2004-2005, Roy was President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. He also serves as a Director for Teachscape, a company he co-founded in 1999 that provides comprehensive K-12 teacher professional development services incorporating web-based video case studies of standards-based teaching and communities of learners.
Senior Science Advisor
SRI International
Prior to joining SRI International in 2001, Dr. Nora H. Sabelli was Senior Program Director for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Education and Human Resources. She has worked on many NSF-wide and cross-agency initiatives related to education, technology and science, such as Learning and Intelligent Systems and Interagency Education Research Initiatives.
At the NSF, Dr. Sabelli focused on the support of research on the use of current scientific advances and technological opportunities to help provide quality science and mathematics education for all students. She worked on education issues at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans, and programs of the Federal Government.
In addition to her directorship at the NSF, Dr. Sabelli’s former positions include senior research scientist and assistant director for education at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and associate professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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