Biography

Maryanne Wolf is the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, and Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She received her doctorate from Harvard University, where she began work in cognitive neuroscience on the reading brain, literacy, and dyslexia. She received two degrees in literature from Northwestern University and St. Mary’s College/University of Notre Dame. Selected teaching awards include Distinguished Professor of the Year (Massachusetts Psychological Association) and the Teaching Excellence Award for Universities (American Psychological Association). Dyslexia awards include: Alice Ansara Award, Norman Geschwind Lecture Award, and Samuel Orton Award (International Dyslexia Association’s highest honors), Dyslexia Researcher Award from Windward School, and Eminent Researcher Award for Learning Difficulties in 2016 (Australia). Research awards include: NICHD Shannon Award for Innovative Research, Distinguished Researcher Award; Fulbright Research Fellowship (Germany); and the Christopher Columbus Award for intellectual discovery for work in Africa, India, and Australia on global literacy. This cross-disciplinary work was the content of three invited lectures to the Vatican Academy of Sciences and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University where she is currently.

The author of over 150 scientific publications, Wolf wrote Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, now translated into 13 languages, Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (2016, Oxford University Press) and will publish Letters to the Good Reader: The Future of the Reading Brain in a Digital Culture (Harper-Collins) in Fall, 2017.

1-054 - Tales of the Reading Brain

Session Type: Invited Address

Integrative Statement

This keynote will highlight three areas: first, the mysteries around how the reading brain was formed, with implications for reading development, dyslexia, and the “deep reading processes”. Particular emphases will be given to the development of empathy and critical thinking in reading development. Second, pertinent new research on dyslexia will be provided with emphases on the Kindergarten prediction of subtypes of readers with dyslexia and their targeted intervention. Finally, the cautions and promise of digital reading will be discussed alongside a description of exciting new work on global literacy. Digital tablets based on principles of the reading brain circuitry will be described within deployments in remote regions of Africa, India,and Australia, and in rural United States.

Sub Unit

• Invited Program on Neuroscience & Child Development

Chair

• Jennie Grammer, UCLA

Speaker

• Maryanne Wolf, Tufts University