Goren Gordon has B.M.Sc, M.Sc. in physics and M.B.A. from Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His first Ph.D. was in quantum physics and his second Ph.D in computational neuroscience, both from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Goren has more than 40 publications, in several disciplines; his quantum protocols and optimal decoherence control papers are highly cited and his curiosity-based neuroscience and robotics research has received several "best paper awards" in international conferences. He is currently a post-doctorate associate in Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robots Group, Media Lab, MIT where he is studying models of curiosity in children and robots and their interactions. His research interests are machine learning, neuroscience of curiosity, developmental robotics as well as science education for children and the general public.

 

 

Jamie Jirout began studying children’s curiosity at the University of Miami, where she earned her undergraduate degree in psychology. She continued to study the basic questions of what it means to be curious and how to measure curiosity as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University as part of the IES-funded Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research training grant. She went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center at Temple University, where she studied how play can promote the development of spatial reasoning. She is currently an assistant professor of psychology at Rhodes College, where she directs the Research in Education and Learning Lab. Jamie’s work has been published in journals including Psychological Science, Mind, Brain, and Education, and Science. Her research focuses on young children’s curiosity and question asking, and how children’s play helps them learn to reason about science and space. Her current work investigates how the US educational system influences children’s curiosity, achievement motivation, and mindset. 

 

 

Susan Engel is Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Founding Director of the Program in Teaching at Williams College. Her research interests include the development of curiosity, children’s narratives, play, and more generally, teaching and learning. Her current research looks at whether students learn to think differently in college. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cognitive Development, Harvard Educational Review, and the American Education Research Journal. She is the author of six books: The Stories Children Tell: Making Sense of the Narratives of Childhood, Context is Everything: The Nature of Memory, Real Kids: Making Sense in Everyday Life, Red Flags or Red Herrings: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood, and The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools. She has also published a number of columns and op-ed pieces on education in the New York Times. She is a founder of, and the educational advisor to an experimental school in NY State. She is currently writing a book on high school. She lives in New Marlborough MA with her husband Tom Levin. They have three sons, Jake, Will and Sam.

 

 

Alicia Chang leads educational content and learning design at Wonder Workshop, a Silicon Valley-based startup that makes robots that help elementary-aged children learn computational thinking and foundational programming skills through hands-on play. A cognitive and developmental psychologist by training, Alicia earned her Ph.D. at UCLA prior to completing postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pittsburgh Learning Research and Development Center and the University of Delaware School of Education. Her research has spanned a wide range of topics in cognitive development, ranging from cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences in early number language exposure to preschoolers and its later effects on mathematical achievement, to cognitive science applications to STEM education. Her research on gender differences in mathematical talk to young boys and girls has been covered by mainstream media outlets including the New York Times and Harvard Business Review. She is a co-author of the book Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom, and has served as a consultant for Nickelodeon and the Pacific Research Institute.