Dr. Maryanne Wolf 2017
The topic of the 16th Annual Timothy B. and Jane A. Burnett Seminar for Academic Achievement was “The Mystery, Challenges and Beauty of Dyslexia: Insights from the Reading Brain,” featuring Dr. Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. In this presentation, Dr. Wolf provides insights from cognitive neuroscience on the development of the reading brain circuit and why dyslexia represents a different organization of the brain rather than a disorder of reading. The seminar emphasizes the deep reading processes and intervention principals for teens and college students.
Watch Dr. Maryanne Wolf’s 2017 Burnett Seminar presentation here.
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.