Maryanne Wolf

Dr. Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, teacher, and advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is Professor-in-Residence, and Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA in the School of Education and Information Studies and the former John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. She is Chapman University’s Presidential Fellow. She is a past Fellow (2014-2015), Research Affiliate (2016-2017), and present member (2021- 2023) of the Board at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her awards include highest honors from International Dyslexia Association (Geschwind and Orton awards) and The Dyslexia Foundation (Einstein Prize); Distinguished Researcher of the Year for Learning Disabilities in Australia; Distinguished Teacher of the Year from the state and national American Psychological Association; Fulbright Fellowship (Germany); and the Christopher Columbus Award for Intellectual Innovation for co-founding Curious Learning: A Global Literacy Initiative, with deployments in Africa, India, Australia, and rural United States. She served as an external advisor to the International Monetary Fund and is a board member of the Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation. She has several honorary doctorates, and has authored over 170 scientific publications; the RAVE-O reading curriculum for dyslexia; RAN/RAS tests of reading prediction with Martha Denckla; and Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (15 translations; HarperCollins, 2007); Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016); and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital Culture (11 translations, HarperCollins, 2018). In the last year, she received both the national award from the Reading League for her contributions to reading research and the Walter Ong Award for her work on the effects of different mediums on the intellectual development of the species. Most recently, she was elected a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science.