Maryanne Wolf is the UCLADistinguished Visiting Professor of Education and Director of the UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice and the Chapman University Presidential Fellow. She is also the former 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.
Education and work
She completed her doctorate at Harvard University, in the Department of Human Development and Psychology in the Graduate School of Education, where she began her work in cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics on the reading brain, literacy development, and dyslexia. She received her undergraduate and Master's degrees in literature from Saint Mary'sCollege of Notre Dame and from Northwestern University. Within literacy areas, she has served on the Library of Congress Advisory Committee on Literacy Awards, and the Advisory Committee to the X Prize, whose new award will target Global Literacy, based in part on the recent work on literacy by her joint team in Ethiopia. With pediatric neurologist Martha Bridge Dencla she has published the RAN-RAS test for measuring naming speed, one of the best predictors of dyslexia across all languages. Funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, she created the RAVE-O intervention program for children with dyslexia and beginning readers. She was a Fellow and Research Affiliate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is currently working with members of the Dyslexia Center in the UCSF School of Medicine, as well as with the faculty at Chapman University on issues related to dyslexia. She serves as an External Advisor to the International Monetary Fund, a research advisor to the Canadian Children's Literacy Foundation, and a frequent speaker at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Awards
Selected awards include Distinguished Professor of the Year from the Massachusetts Psychological Association; the Teaching Excellence Award for Universities from the American Psychological Association. For her work in dyslexia she has received the Alice Ansara Award, the Norman Geschwind Lecture Award, and Samuel Orton Award. For her research she has received the NICHD Shannon Award for Innovative Research, which resulted in the RAVE-O reading intervention program; the Distinguished Researcher Award; the Fulbright Research Fellowship for work on dyslexia in Germany; the Christopher Columbus Award for intellectual discovery for her most recent work in Ethiopia and South Africa on the development of a digital learning experience that will bring literacy to children in remote regions of the world; the 2016 Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties Eminent Researcher from Learning Difficulties Australia; and the Dyslexia Research Hero award by Windward School in New York. Most recently, she received The Dyslexia Foundation's Einstein Award.
