Elisabeth R. Gee was an Associate Director for the Center for Games & Impact. Gee is a Professor and holds the Delbert & Jewell Lewis Chair in Reading & Literacy at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. She has published widely on the topics of literacy, gender, gaming, and learning; her recent books include Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010), Language and Learning in a Digital Age (2011), both co-authored with James Gee, and Learning in Video Gaming Affinity Spaces (2012) (co-edited with Sean Duncan). Prof. Hayes is currently the co-director of Play2Connect, a research and outreach project that aims to promote intergenerational learning, communication, and well being through video games. One of her current studies is an investigation of how joint media engagement in Hispanic families, particularly around games, might enhance literacy development and problem solving skills.
Alan Gershenfeld spent the last twenty years at the intersection of entertainment, technology and social entrepreneurship. He is currently Founder and President of E-Line Media, a publisher of digital entertainment that engages, educates and empowers – with a core focus on computer/video games. E-Line works with leading foundations, academics, non-profits and government agencies to harness the power of games for learning, health, and social impact.
Prior to E-Line, Alan spent seven years as CEO and Co-Founder of netomat, a leader in mobile-web community solutions. As CEO, Alan helped to transform a network-based art project into a pioneering software company, raising funding from VCs, strategic investors (Motorola, WPP, Forbes), foundations (Rockefeller’s ProVenEx double bottom line fund) and securing clients and partnerships with leading technology and content providers such as Electronic Arts, Warner Brothers, Motorola and Miramax. netomat was selected as a Technology Pioneer at the 2007 World Economic Forum at Davos.
Before netomat, Alan spent six years at Activision, a global leader in entertainment software. He was a member of the executive management team that rebuilt Activision from bankruptcy into a profitable industry leader with more than a billion dollars in revenue. At Activision, Alan served as Senior Vice President of Activision Studios where he supervised all product development at the company’s Los Angeles studios. Titles released under Alan’s leadership include Civilization: Call to Power, Asteroids, Muppet Treasure Island, Spycraft, Pitfall, Zork and Tony Hawk Skateboarding.
Before Activision, Alan spent nearly ten years in the film industry where he worked in development, production and post-production with credits on numerous feature films and documentaries. As a writer, Alan was a film critic for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and co-author of Game Plan, a book about the computer and video game business published by St. Martin’s Press.
As a speaker, Alan has presented at a wide variety of conferences throughout the world including PC Forum, South By South West, Sundance Film Festival, Games for Change, CTIA, Teach For America, Game Developers Conference, National Writers Workshop,, MIT Fab Lab Conference, Milia/Cannes, LAX Conference, Game, Learning & Society, ICE/Toronto, Game On Texas, Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, SoCap and the World Economic Forum at Davos. Alan has also lead game design workshops throughout the works for students, teachers, parents and policy makers, most recently at the invitation of the White House for the 100 Presidential Math and Science Teachers Award Winners.
Alan serves on the Board of Directors of FilmAid International, a nonprofit that uses film and video to empower refugees throughout the world and on the Advisory Boards of PBS Kids New Media, We Are Family Foundation, Global Kids and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center For Educational Media and Research (Sesame Workshop). He is also on the Advisory Board and former Chairman of Games for Change, a nonprofit that helps to rise the sector of computer and video games for social change.
Bronwyn has been engaged in educational community and games in learning development for the past 12 years from her doctoral study of 12 successful online communities through to designing and facilitating communities of practice and coaching with Etienne Wenger. She has also worked to explore virtual worlds, games in learning and how we can cultivate identity, agency, citizenship, leadership, and community for students and teachers. Her role in the global communities of Massively Productive, Massively Minecraft and Quest Atlantis has lead to some breakthrough understandings about how digital citizenship needs to be perceived as a lived curriculum. Bronwyn has recently found a marriage of her two great loves; professional communities of practice and games in learning, in the current gamification agenda. She spent 2012 designing game layers for large educational communities of practice tying fun, community development. individual roles and identity and teacher accreditation together.
Kate T. Anderson is an assistant professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation. Kate received her PhD in Linguistics along with an Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Studies from The University of Georgia. Her interdisciplinary research draws on traditions in qualitative inquiry, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and the learning sciences. Through collaborations with youth, teachers, and community centers in the U.S. and Singapore, Kate’s educational research agenda interrogates the role of language ideologies in constructing everyday notions of social difference, with regard to ability, race, language learning, and other social categories and constructions.
Steve Zuiker is an Assistant Professor of educational technology in the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Dr. Zuiker earned his doctorate in the interdisciplinary field of the Learning Sciences at Indiana University in 2007. He joined the Teachers College faculty in 2012 following appointments at Rice University and Singapore’s National Institute of Education. He previously served as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania and subsequently as a Peace Corps Teaching Fellow in New York City’s Spanish Harlem.
CGI Q&A: J-Schools and the Language of Technology
Retha Hill joined the Cronkite faculty in the summer of 2007 after nearly eight years at BET, where she was vice president for content for BET Interactive, the online unit of Black Entertainment Television and the most visited site specializing in African-American content on the Internet. In that senior role, she was in charge of content strategy and convergence with the television network.
Before joining BET, Hill was executive producer for special projects at washingtonpost.com, developing new products for The Washington Post’s Web site. She joined The Post’s early online operations in 1995 as the editor for local news, arts and entertainment.
Hill is the recipient of the New Media Catalyst Award, given by the National Association of Minority Media Executives. She also has been president of the Washington Association of Black Journalists and a fellow at the McCormick Tribune Management program and the Al Fitzpatrick Leadership Development Institute. An adjunct professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Hill has been a frequent guest speaker at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the Poynter Institute, the Online News Association, the American Press Institute, the Freedom Forum and the National Press Club.
Spiro Maroulis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Affairs, and the Associate Director for Policy Informatics at the Decision Theater. His research addresses problems involved with understanding the relationship between individual and collective behavior. This includes investigating implementation difficulties with strategic initiatives inside organizations, as well as modeling the emergence and evolution of markets and institutions.
Prior to coming to ASU, Professor Maroulis was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Enterprise and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Ford Center for Global Citizenship at the Kellogg School of Management. He received his B.S.E from Duke University, M.P.P. from Harvard University, and Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where he was also a member of the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL) and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). Outside of academia, he has worked for Red Hat Software and Anderson Consulting (now Accenture), and was also the cofounder of PracticeFields, LLC, a corporate education and consulting company that creates computer simulations and interactive board games of business systems — an approach he now enthusiastically applies to policy problems in his work at the Decision Theater.
Bryan Brayboy is Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. His scholarship, teaching, and service centers on underrepresented students and faculty in higher education. His research focuses on the strategies used to achieve academic success by American Indian college students, and the cultural, emotional, psychological, political, and financial costs and benefits of this academic success. In 2002, he founded the University of Utah American Indian Teacher Training Program, which aims to prepare indigenous educators to return to their communities and work with Indigenous children.
Dr. Robert Atkinson is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering in the Ira A. Schools of Engineering and the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation in the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College. He earned in Applied Cognitive Science PhD degree fin 1999 from University of Wisconsin – Madison with a minor in statistics and research design. He joined the ASU faculty in 2002 as an assistant professor after teaching for three years at Mississippi State University.
Kurt VanLehn is a Professor in the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State University. He received a Ph. D. from MIT in 1983 in Computer Science, was a post-doc at BBN and Xerox PARC, joined the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University in 1985, moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 and joined ASU in 2008. He founded and co-directed two large NSF research centers (Circle; the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center). He has published over 125 peer-reviewed publications, is a fellow in the Cognitive Science Society, and is on the editorial boards of Cognition and Instructionand the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education.
Dr. VanLehn’s research focuses on applications of artificial intelligence to education and cognitive modeling. Some of his recent projects are: Andes, an intelligent tutoring system for a full year of college/high school physics that improves students grades by approximate a letter grade and is in daily use around the country;Why2-Atlas and Cordillera, two intelligent tutoring systems that pioneered the use of natural language dialogues for science teaching and have been shown to be just as effective as expert human tutors; Pyrenees, an intelligent tutoring system that successfully caused inter-domain transfer by implicitly teaching a meta-cognitive strategy; and Cascade, a highly accurate cognitive model of human students learning physics that accounts for the interaction of self-explanation and analogy.
Dr. Frank Serafini is an author, illustrator, photographer, educator, musician, and an Associate Professor of Literacy Education and Children’s Literature at Arizona State University. In addition, Frank was an elementary school teacher for nine years in Phoenix, AZ, and spent three years as a literacy specialist in K-6 classrooms. Frank spends a great deal of time providing staff development workshops and conducting research focusing on reading instruction and the role of children’s literature in the reading curriculum. He has published seven professional development books for elementary educators with Scholastic and Heinemann Publishers. Frank is currently working on a research project focusing on Visual Literacies. More information can be found at www.frankserafini.com.
Dr. James Blasingame focuses on young adult literature, secondary writing instruction, preparing pre-service teachers, and cowboy poetry. He is co-editor of The ALAN Review, a journal devoted entirely to young adult literature and sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English. He also created the Books for Adolescents pages of the Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, which is sponsored by the International Reading Association. Dr. Blasingame is the author of Books That Don’t Bore ‘Em: Young Adult Literature for Today’s Generation (Scholastic, 2007), Gary Paulsen (Teen Reads: Student Companions to Young Adult Literature) (Greenwood Press 2007), Teaching Writing in Middle and Secondary Schools (Pearson, Prentice-Hall 2004), and They Rhymed with Their Boots On: A Teacher’s Guide to Cowboy Poetry (The Writing Conference, 2000). He has also published over 60 interviews with poets and authors of young adult literature and over 100 book reviews in VOYA, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, The ALAN Review and English Journal. Dr. Blasingame creates the annual Honor List of young adult literature for English Journal along with Dr. Alleen Nilsen and Dr. Ken Donelson. He has given presentations performing cowboy poetry at the National Council of Teachers of English convention, the International Reading Association, and the Western States Conference on Rhetoric and Composition.
Dr. Blasingame is past president of the Arizona English Teachers’ Association and is the 2008 ASU Professor of the Year. He is the 2008 International Reading Association Arbuthnot Award winner for outstanding professor of children’s and young adult literature. He was the recipient of the 2007 ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award for the Humanities and one of eleven ASU professors to be given the 2007 Arizona State University Parents’ Association Professor of the Year Special Recognition Award.
Before coming to ASU in 2000, Dr. Blasingame spent twenty-four years in secondary education including: three years in high school administration at Interstate 35 High School (Truro, Iowa), and Bishop Miege High School (Shawnee Mission, Kansas); eighteen years in English education at Girls and Boys Town High School (Boys Town, Nebraska); American Fork High School (American Fork, Utah); and Dowling High School (West Des Moines, Iowa). He also spent two years coaching college athletics at Western State College (Gunnison, Colorado) and Simpson College (Simpson, Iowa).
Danielle S. McNamara (Ph.D. 1992, University of Colorado, Boulder) joins the ASU Learning Sciences Institute, Department of Psychology, and the School of CIDSE in the fall of 2011. She joins ASU from the University of Memphis where she was Director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Professor in the Department of Psychology for 9 years. Her academic background includes a Linguistics B.A. (1982), a Clinical Psychology M.S. (1989), and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (1992; UC-Boulder). The overarching theme of her research is to better understand cognitive processes involved in comprehension, writing, knowledge acquisition, and memory, and to apply that understanding to educational practice by developing and testing educational technologies (e.g., Coh-Metrix, iSTART, Writing Pal. Two of her projects, The Writing Pal and iSTART, are computer assisted learning programs designed to advance students writing and reading comprehension. Coh-Metrix is a text analysis tool designed to advance our understanding of the nature of text difficulty. She has published over 200 papers and secured over 10 million in federal funding. Her work has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the McDonnell Foundation, and the Gates Foundation. She serves as Associate Editor for three journals, topiCS, the Cognitive Science Journal, and the Journal of Educational Psychology and currently serves on a standing review panel for the National Institute of Health (NIH) as well as numerous review panels for IES, NSF, and NICHD. She has served on the Governing Boards for the Society for Text and Discourse and the Cognitive Science Society.
Dr. Danielle McNamara will continue her research on the Writing-Pal (W-Pal) when she joins the faculty at ASU. W-Pal is a newly developed intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy instruction to high school students and entering college students. This is a ground breaking intelligent tutoring system that will allow educators and researchers to explore the value of writing strategy training on the quality of essay writing. A teacher interface allows the teacher (or experimenter) to create classes, co-manage other classes, monitor students’ performance, post bulletins, assign practice essays, create and assign new essays, and make comments on essays. The student interface comprises nine strategy lessons: Prologue, Freewriting, Planning, Introduction Building, Body Building, Conclusion Building, Paraphrasing, Cohesion Building, and Revising. Each lesson includes game based challenges to practice writing strategies. The student also has opportunities to write essays with automated feedback driven by natural language algorithms and instructs the students to focus on ‘next steps’ and strategies to improve the essay. W-Pal is intended to improve high school students’ writing abilities and reduce demands on teachers. Current work in classroom studies is focused on evaluating the usability, feasibility, and efficacy of W-Pal.
James A. Middleton is Professor of Engineering Education and Director of the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology at Arizona State University. Prior to these appointments, Dr. Middleton served as Associate Dean for Research for the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University for 3 years, and as Director of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction for another 3 years plus. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992, where he also served in the National Center for Research on Mathematical Sciences Education as a postdoctoral scholar for 3 years.
Jim’s research interests focus in the following areas where he has published extensively: Children’s mathematical thinking; Teacher and Student motivation in mathematics; and Teacher Change in mathematics. He is currently developing methodologies for utilizing the engineering design process to improve learning environments in Science, Engineering and Mathematics. He has also written on effective uses of educational technology in mathematics and science education as a natural outgrowth of these interests. To fund his research, Jim has garnered over $20 million in grants to study and improve mathematics education in urban schools. He just finished a $1.8 million research grant to model the longitudinal development of fractions, rational number and proportional reasoning knowledge and skills in middle school students, and is currently engaged in a project studying the sustainability of changes in urban elementary teachers’ mathematics practices. All of his work has been conducted in collaborative partnerships with diverse, economically challenged, urban schools. This relationship has resulted in a significant (positive) impact on the direction that partner districts have taken, including a significant increase in mathematics achievement in the face of a rising poverty rate.
Dr. Middleton just finished a term as Senior co-Chair of the Special Interest Group for Mathematics Education in the American Educational Research Association. Previously he served for three years on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Research Committee, chairing that committee in 2006. He has served on several task forces for the NCTM, is a regular reviewer for the NSF and the Department of Education, and serves on the Boards of several regional and national-level research centers. He has been a consultant for the Rand Corporation, the National Academies, the American Statistical Association, the IEEE, and numerous school systems around the country.
Braden R. Allenby is currently a Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, and a Professor of Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering, and of Law, at Arizona State University, having moved from his previous position as the Environment, Health and Safety Vice President for AT&T in 2004. He is the founding director of the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management, and the founding chair of the Consortium for Emerging Technologies, Military Operations, and National Security, at ASU. He is also an AAAS Fellow, a Batten Fellow in Residence at the University of Virginias Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures & Commerce. He was the U.S. Naval Academy Stockdale Fellow in 2009-2010, a Templeton Fellow in 2008-2010, and the J. Herbert Hollowman Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering in 1991-1992.
During 1995 and 1996 he served as Director of Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Allenby received his BA from Yale University in 1972, his J. D. from the University of Virginia Law School in 1978, his Masters in Economics from the University of Virginia in 1979, his Masters in Environmental Sciences from Rutgers University in the Spring of 1989, and his Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from Rutgers in 1992. His areas of expertise include industrial ecology, sustainable engineering, earth systems engineering and management, and emerging technologies. His latest books are Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Engineering (co-authored with Tom Graedel, 2010), The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Engineering (Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), and The Techno-Human Condition (with Dan Sarewitz, 2011).
Dr. Arthur Glenberg is a Professor at the Department of Psychology.
How do words, objects, and events become meaningful to us? Dr. Glenberg and his students are attacking these problems by developing an embodied theory of cognition. For their research, meaning consists of the set of actions one can take in particular situations, and those actions are a function of the physical situation, how one’s body works, and one’s experiences. Dr. Glenberg’s recent work has demonstrated a) how actions in a situation are an essential prerequisite for new learning; b) how language comprehension takes advantage of one’s knowledge of how actions can be combined; and c) how linguistic structures coordinate with action-based knowledge to result in language comprehension. He has also begun to investigate application embodiment theories to enhance children’s reading comprehension and mathematical problem solving.
CGI Fellow Q&A: The ICAP Hypothesis
Michelene Chi, a Professor of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, is a cognitive learning scientist. Dr. Chi’s research focuses on understanding how students learn and designing new instructional formats to enhance students’ learning of concepts in science-related domains, for students at the K-16 level. She has published widely on various topics of learning, such as conceptual change, expertise, learning from being tutored and learning strategies such as self-explaining.
Her current work focuses on three strands. One strand tests her hypothesis about how to assess the different ways of engaging students cognitively, using students’ overt actions as a measure of cognitive engagement. Her theoretical framework and hypothesis can predict not only how well students learn on the basis of their overt engagement behaviors, but also can inform instructors on how to design more engaging classroom activities. A second strand of her work focuses on ways of enhancing students’ understanding of emergent-kind of processes that are typically taught in science classes, such as the processes of natural selection and diffusion. Her theoretical analyses suggest that in order for students to understand this kind of processes, students must first be taught ideas about emergence. The third strand of her current work examines novel ways to deliver online instruction that may optimize students’ learning. One such method is to present instructional materials via videos of tutorial dialogue, as opposed to videos of a talking head (or an instructional monologue).
In addition to these three research strands, Dr. Chi continues to develop new ways of coding protocols, such as coding interactions, as well as pursuing ways to maximize the effectiveness of collaborative learning. Her work has been widely cited (close to 23,000 times, see http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AlW99VQAAAAJ&hl=en). In recognition of her scholarship, Dr. Chi has received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Senior Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh. One of her papers has reached the status of a “citation classic.” Dr. Chi was a former executive editor of Cognitive Science, one of seven inaugural Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, and an invited resident Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She was recently elected to the National Academy of Education.
Dr. Alice Daer is an Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. She is a member of the Rhetoric and Composition faculty and teach courses on social media and videogame studies. Primarily, Daer researches how people write and learn to write with and around social media. Her work draws heavily from the field of literacy studies in education and the learning sciences.
Prior to ASU, Dr. Alica Daer was a postdoctoral fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT from 2006-2008. While at MIT she worked with Henry Jenkins on the New Media Literacies project and taught courses on videogame studies. As a PhD student at Wisconsin-Madison from 2000-2006, she worked in both English and Education with David Fleming, Deborah Brandt, Brad Hughes, James Paul Gee, Elisabeth Hayes, and Kurt Squire.
Brian C. Nelson is an Associate Professor of Educational Technology in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. Dr. Nelson’s research focuses on the theory, design, and implementation of computer-based learning environments, focusing on immersive games. An instructional designer and learning theorist, he has published and presented extensively on the viability of educational virtual environments for situated inquiry learning and assessment. Dr. Nelson’s recent publications have addressed issues related to the design and evaluation of educational games, with a focus on situated cognition and socio-constructivist based design. Recent articles and chapters include “Managing cognitive load in educational multi user virtual environments,” “Exploring embedded guidance and self-efficacy in educational multi-user virtual environments,” and “Exploring the use of individualized, reflective guidance in an educational multi-user virtual environment.”
Dr. Nelson was the Project Designer on the River City Virtual World project through two NSF-funded studies, and is a Co-Principal Investigator on the on-going NSF-funded SAVE Science and SURGE studies. Each of these studies explores the use of computer games to teach and assess science inquiry and content. He was recently co-PI on two MacArthur Foundation grants: 21 st Century Assessment, investigating new models for assessment in digital media-based learning environments, and Our Courts, creating and assessing an immersive game to promote civic engagement.
Dr. Nelson earned his doctorate at Harvard University in 2005.
Winslow Burleson is an Assistant Professor of Human Computer Interaction at School of Computing and Informatics at Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. He received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab, Affective Computing Group. He joined the ASU Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Arts, Media, and Engineering graduate program in 2006. At MIT he was involved with the Context-Aware Computing Group and the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School.
He was a Senior Research Scientist at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and Research Staff Member at IBM’s Almaden Research Center where he was awarded nine patents. Awarded a Master of Science degree at Stanford University’s Mechanical Engineering Product Design Program, he taught brainstorming, creativity, innovation, and visual thinking within that department. Prior work included curriculum development at the SETI Institute, Co-Principal Investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope’s Investigation of Binary Asteroids, and consultant to UNICEF and the World Scout Bureau on Healthy Lifestyles for Youth. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Bio-Physics from Rice University.
Dr. Johnson-Glenberg is an Associate Research Scientist in the School of Art and Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her areas of interest include text comprehension and remediation of reading disorders, especially using Web-based computer-aided instruction. She has received multiple federal educational technology grants to create comprehension and metacognitive instructional software for middle school readers – these applications can be experienced at www.neuronfarm.com. In addition, Dr. Johnson-Glenberg has published widely on cognition, embodied learning in new media, neural networks, and fragile X syndrome (the most common form of heritable intellectual disability).
She is the Director of SEGL, the group creating Serious Embodied Games for Learning. In addition, she serves as the assessment lead for SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab) located in the School of AME (Arts, Media and Engineering). Her group uses multiple assessment methodologies to illucidate learning over time in an immersive, motion-tracking learning environment. She teaches several courses including: 1) the Psychology of e-Learning and Gaming that focuses on new media and how to create appropriate efficacy studies for that rapidly changing world, and 2) a survey of Intellectual Disabiities from Autism to fragile X. See the SMALLab website for information on how to get SMALLab into your classroom.
Dr. Richard Fabes is Dee & John Whiteman Distinguished Professor and the director of the Social and Family Dynamics. His current research project is a federally funded study of children’s adjustment to school: The Understanding School Success (USS) project, of which he is a principal investigator. He is also PI of the Sanford Harmony Program.
Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values
Director, The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures
Affiliate Faculty Member, ASU Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes
Joel Garreau, who joined the College in 2010, is a student of culture, values and change. Professor Garreau is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means to Be Human, a look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. The genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnology revolutions are changing what it means to be human – modifying people’s minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities and progeny – not in some distant science fiction future but right now, on our watch. As director of The Prevail Project, he will build upon a Radical Evolution concept that the Prevail Scenario – the humanistic possibility that we can control and direct this future – might be encouraged. The idea is that if the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) can accelerate the technological future into being, perhaps the same can be done for the responses of our societies.
Professor Garreau is a former long-time reporter and editor at The Washington Post, and he is principal of The Garreau Group, a network of sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we’re headed.
Professor Garreau is a fellow at The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., an affiliate of The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford, a Science Journalism Laureate at Purdue University, and a member of Global Business Network. He has served as a fellow at Cambridge University, the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University. Professor Garreau is the author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, and The Nine Nations of North America.
Arizona State University announces the appointment of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Leland “Lee” H. Hartwell to lead an expansive effort addressing two of today’s top concerns: improving the effectiveness of health care while reducing its costs, and advancing science education. Hartwell is the first Nobel Prize recipient in physiology or medicine to serve a faculty appointment at an Arizona university. He will establish and co-direct the Center for Sustainable Health at ASU’s Biodesign Institute as ASU’s second Virginia G. Piper Chair of Personalized Medicine. The new center is the latest step in the evolution of the Arizona-based Partnership for Personalized Medicine, launched by Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust.
Hartwell’s new center in the Biodesign Institute will identify biomarkers-early indicators of disease- to enable personalized, pre-symptomatic diagnoses, and it will develop tools for providing the intelligence needed for better patient outcomes. It will interface with other Biodesign centers working on complimentary aspects of these goals. Hartwell is no stranger to Arizona, having served as executive chairman of the Partnership for Personalized Medicine since its creation. The partnership includes the Biodesign Institute, Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Hartwell currently is president and director of the Hutchinson Center. Hartwell has announced he will retire from his post at the Hutchinson Center in June 2010. He will then assume his ASU tenured faculty appointment.
During the coming academic year, he will begin preliminary preparations for the new center during a phased transition approved by Hutchinson Center. Hartwell will have several academic appointments at ASU. His interest in advancing science education will be furthered serving as a tenured professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Other tenured appointments include ASU’s School of Life Sciences and School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, areas critical to his sustainable health initiative. For most of Hartwell’s career he studied genes that control cell division in yeast. Subsequently many of these same genes have been found to control cell division in humans and often to be the site of alteration in cancer. Hartwell also turned to yeast to investigate the basis for accurate cellular reproduction and discovered a new class of gene: the “checkpoint” gene. These genes notice when mistakes have been made during cellular reproduction and halt cell division so that repair can take place. His insights into cell-cycle control are being used at the Hutchinson Center and elsewhere to develop treatments for cancer and other diseases.
Recently his interests have turned to how we can use the enormous knowledge that has accumulated over the last 50 years in genetics and biochemistry to benefit cancer patients. He believes that the most efficient path is to improve molecular diagnostics to identify individuals at high risk for disease, detect cancer and other diseases at an early stage when they can be cured, provide prognostic information and monitor therapeutic response. Proteins will likely provide the best diagnostic information because of their greater diversity and because their state reflects biological function. The technology for protein diagnostics, however, is in its infancy. Hartwell’s efforts are directed toward improving the field of protein diagnostics.
Hartwell earned a B.S. at the California Institute of Technology and in 1964 earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Dr. Boris Magasanik. He engaged in postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1964 through 1965 with Dr. Renato Dulbecco. He joined the University of Washington faculty in 1968 as a genetics professor. In 1996 he joined the faculty of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and in 1997 became its president and director. Hartwell is the recipient of many national and international scientific awards, including the 2001 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Other honors include the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the Gairdner Foundation International Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Award in cancer research. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.