Dr. Linda Curtis-Bey joined the American Museum of Natural History in 2018 as a Senior Director of Education. As the Senior Director, Dr. Curtis-Bey is the Director of the Gottesman Center for Teaching and Learning which provides professional learning opportunities and events for K-12 educators and includes the Urban Advantage program, a middle school project-based learning initiative supporting 300 middle schools in partnership with eight of NYC’s leading science-rich cultural institutions. She is also the Co-Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Earth Science Residency Program which prepares graduate students to be Earth Science teachers in high needs schools.

Before joining the AMNH staff, Linda worked for the NYC Department of Education for almost 30 years and retired as the Executive Director of STEM. Dr. Curtis-Bey serves as a member of the NYS Technology Policy and Practice Council.  She has served as a working group member of the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which published – Prepare and Inspire: K-12 Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) for America’s Future; as a member of the Joint Task Force on the Common Core State Standards; and, as a member of the Emerging Issues Committee of NCTM.

Dr. Curtis-Bey holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College (B.A.), Hunter College (M.S., Environmental and Occupational Health), Teachers College, Columbia University (M.A. Education and Ed.D. Urban Education Leadership) and an Executive Coaching Certificate from the Columbia University School of Business. Dr. Curtis-Bey was inducted into the NYS Mathematics Educators Hall of Fame in 2015 and received the Distinguished Educator Award from The City College Alumni Association in 2016.

Over a 30-year span, Dr. Gladys I. Cruz has established a distinguished career in education as a teacher and leader at the local, regional and state levels.

As District Superintendent for Questar III, Cruz is responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations of the Castleton-based BOCES, reporting directly to the Board of Education. Along, with her leadership team, Cruz provides direction to 23 local school districts and oversees the delivery of more than 275 programs and services across New York State.

Since joining Questar III BOCES in 1998, Cruz has held a number of leadership positions including Chief Operating Officer/Deputy Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent, Director of School Improvement and BETAC Specialist.

Cruz began her career as a teacher in Puerto Rico and her education experience ranges from K-12 schools to universities in New York State and Puerto Rico. In addition, she worked briefly as director of curriculum services for the New York State Education Department.

Cruz holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and a master’s degree in Curriculum Development and Instructional Technology from the State University of New York at Albany. In addition, she holds a master’s degree in Bilingual Education and a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and English from La Universidad del Turabo in Puerto Rico.

Dr. Victoria Hunt is the founding principal of Dos Puentes Elementary School, a public Spanish/English fully Dual Language School in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. Dos Puentes Elementary is a community school within the New York City Department of Education. The school serves children from Kindergarten through 5th Grade and currently has 433 students of which 40% are English Learners.

Dr. Hunt received her Doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her dissertation, ” Transformative Leadership: A comparative case study of established dual language programs” won the 2009 dissertation award from the AERA Special Interest Group for Bilingual Education and the first place dissertation award from the National Association for Bilingual Education also in 2009.

Dr. Hunt has worked in the New York City Schools for more than 25 years, as well as the Houston Public Schools and DC Public Schools, always working with multilingual learners. She has also taught at the university level at Teachers College, Columbia University in the bilingual education department.

Lessons from a Dual Language Bilingual School: Celebrando una década de Dos Puentes Elementary, Edited by Dr. Hunt and her colleagues Dr. Tatyana Kleyn, Dr. Alcira Jaar, Rebeca Madrigal, and Consuelo Villegas will be available to the public in August 2024.

Michael J. Kieffer (He/Him) studies the language and literacy development of students from linguistically diverse backgrounds. A former middle school teacher, he aims to conduct research that can inform instruction and policy to improve the reading outcomes of students in urban schools, especially multilingual learners. He has published over 50 articles, including longitudinal studies of the reading and language development of English learners, experimental evaluations of vocabulary instruction, and secondary analyses of large longitudinal datasets. Committed to interdisciplinarity, he collaborates widely with colleagues in other areas, including developmental psychology, applied statistics, special education, and educational policy. His research has received funding and awards from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Spencer Foundation, American Educational Research Association, and the International Reading Association.

Nonie K. Lesaux is the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). She leads a research program on strategies and innovations to improve learning opportunities and literacy outcomes for children and youth. Her teaching focuses on literacy development and reform, early learning, and leading system-level change.

Lesaux works largely through partnerships with school districts, states, and communities. In school districts, Lesaux investigates language, reading, and social-emotional development; classroom quality and academic growth; and strategies to accelerate language and reading comprehension. In states and communities, she brings tools and concepts from improvement science to strengthen literacy plans and policy initiatives, grade-level reading campaigns, and birth-to-eight early learning initiatives. Her research-practice partnerships with large urban school districts, to improve literacy rates, include seven years with San Diego Unified and ten years with the New York City Department of Education.

With Stephanie Jones, Lesaux leads the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative at HGSE, which addresses the pervasive global challenge of simultaneously scaling and improving the quality of early education. Anchored by a first-of-its-kind large-scale study to inform a new era of science and policymaking in early education, and a new model of capacity-building for leaders, the Initiative’s network and partnerships represent all 50 U.S. states and 92 countries.

Lesaux’s research appears in numerous scholarly publications, and its practical applications are featured in several books for school leaders and educators. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Reading Research (2022) and wrote a widely circulated state literacy report, Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success, that inspired a third-grade reading proficiency bill passed in Massachusetts.

Lesaux has earned the William T. Grant Scholars Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young professionals beginning their independent research careers. She served on the U.S. Department of Education’s Reading First Advisory Committee and the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council’s Committee on the Science of Children Birth to Age 8. From 2015 to 2022, Lesaux chaired the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care, which oversees the state agency that licenses and supports childcare and community-based public programs for young children. Lesaux is a member of the National Academy of Education and the board of the Spencer Foundation. She is expert consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

Pedro Noguera was appointed dean of the USC Rossier School of Education in July 2020 and is the holder of the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean’s Chair in Education.

A sociologist, Noguera’s research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, as well as by demographic trends in local, regional and global contexts. He is the author, co-author and editor of 13 books. His most recent books are The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences and Solutions with Niobe Way, Carol Gilligan and Alisha Ali (New York University Press, 2018) and Race, Equity and Education: Sixty Years From Brown with Jill Pierce and Roey Ahram (Springer, 2015).

He has published over 250 research articles in academic journals, book chapters in edited volumes, research reports and editorials in major newspapers. He serves on the boards of numerous national and local organizations, including the Economic Policy Institute, the National Equity Project and The Nation. Noguera appears as a regular commentator on educational issues on several national media outlets, and his editorials on educational issues have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News and Los Angeles Times.

Prior to being appointed dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, Noguera served as a Distinguished Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining the faculty at UCLA he served as a tenured professor and holder of endowed chairs at New York University (2004–2015), Harvard University (2000–2003) and the University of California, Berkeley (1990–2000).

Noguera was recently appointed to serve as a special advisor to the governor of New Mexico on education policy. He also advises the state departments of education in Washington, Oregon and Nevada. From 2009–2012 he served as a trustee for the State University of New York as an appointee of the governor. In 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Education and Phi Delta Kappa honor society, and in 2020 Noguera was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Noguera has received seven honorary doctorates from American universities, and he recently received awards from the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, from the National Association of Secondary School Principals and from the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at NYU for his research and advocacy efforts aimed at fighting poverty.

Noguera holds bachelor’s degrees in sociology and American history, a master’s degree from Brown University and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School of Education. Rooted in her experiences as a former middle school reading specialist, her quantitative and qualitative research explores the relationships between school-relevant language development, language expression, and comprehension during middle childhood with a particular focus on linguistically and culturally minoritized learners.

Emily’s quantitative studies demonstrate links between school-relevant language and reading and writing performances, revealing the importance of attending to language beyond the word-level in order to support the literacy development of middle school students. Her  qualitative work situated in classrooms demonstrates the potential for developing these school-relevant language skills through talk that builds on students’ out-of-school language resources (dialectal and additional languages) and that fosters agency in linguistic choice-making.

With the goal of advancing anti-racist pedagogy, my work aims to positions school-relevant language as a semiotic resource for critically examining inequality, envisioning change, fostering learner agency, and nurturing minoritized learners’ socioemotional, professional, and political aspirations. As a former classroom teacher and reading specialist, she enjoys working alongside teachers and students in classrooms and have led and been engaged with numerous researcher-practitioner partnerships. In particular, with funding from a Lyle Spencer grant from the Spencer Foundation, in collaboration with Dr. Robert J. Jiménez (Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University) Dr. Galloway led a multi-year classroom-based study to design and refine a middle grades curriculum known as TRANSLATE (Teaching Reading And New Strategic Language Approaches to Emergent bilinguals) that aimed to support the reading comprehension development of multilingual learners by leveraging their existing repertoires of language knowledge and cultural practices, including as translators. This resulted in the creation of a 22-week curriculum, which has been shown in a recent quasi-experimental efficacy study to accelerate the reading comprehension (as captured by standardized measures) of participating students. TRANSLATE materials are available at www.translatetoread.com.

With a commitment to advancing research-practice partnerships. Galloway   also works with teachers, school leaders, and administrators in two of the largest urban districts in the United States.

Dr. Galloway’s research has contributed to the publication of two co-authored books: Reimagining Language Instruction: New Approaches to Promoting Equity (Neugebauer, Phillips Galloway, & Dobbs, 2023, Teacher’s College Press) and Leading Advanced Literacy Instruction in Linguistically Diverse Schools: A Guide for Education Leaders (Lesaux, Phillips Galloway, & Marietta, 2016, Guilford Press). Dr. Galloway’s work has also been featured in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Reading Research Quarterly, Applied Psycholinguistics and Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, among others. She is a recipient of the AERA-SRCD Early Career Fellowship in Middle Childhood Education and Development (2019-2021). She hold an Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as an M.S.Ed. and B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Aída Walqui directs the National Research and Development Center for Improving the Education of English Learners in Secondary Schools at WestEd, where she started one of the agency’s signature programs, the Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) initiative. QTEL focuses on the development of educator expertise to support elementary and secondary English Learners’ development of conceptual, analytic, and language practices in disciplinary subject matter areas.

Under her leadership, QTEL has been funded by federal and private institutions to develop and research professional development tools and processes that support the academic success of students who are designated as English Learners. Walqui has also led the design and implementation of multiyear QTEL professional development efforts for the New York City Department of Education and in Austin, San Diego, and Chicago school systems, among others.

Walqui taught in the Division of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the School of Education, Stanford University. A native Peruvian, she received an MS in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University, and her PhD from Stanford University. She has ample experience in the field of second language teaching in schools and at the university level, nationally and internationally. She is the author of many books and articles and co-edited the recent book, Reconceptualizing the Role of Critical Dialogue in American Classrooms: Promoting Equity Through Dialogic Education.

In 2016, on the 50th anniversary of the International TESOL Association, Walqui was selected as one of the 50 most influential researchers in the last 50 years in the field of English Language teaching. In 2023, she was honored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) with the English Learner Champion Award.