About the Report

Jonathan Osborne, PhD, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

Jonathan Osborne’s research focus is a mix of work on policy and pedagogy in the teaching and learning of science. In the policy domain, he is interested in exploring students' attitudes to science and how school science can be made more worthwhile and engaging - particularly for those who will not continue with the study of science. In pedagogy, his focus has been on making the case for the role of argumentation in science education both as a means of improving the use of a more dialogic approach to teaching science and improving student understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry.

Daniel Pimentel, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

Daniel Pimentel a doctoral candidate in the Science Education and Learning Sciences & Technology Design (LSTD) programs at Stanford University. He has also completed training in Science, Technology, & Society (STS) with a specialization in Data & Society at Stanford. Daniel received a B.S. in Biology and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from Boston College. He is a recipient of the Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Fellowship, the Shriram Family Fellowship in Science Education, and the Stanford Graduate School of Education's Dissertation Support Grant. His current research explores how high school students learn to evaluate scientific information on the internet and how science teachers learn to integrate online reasoning practices into their instruction. Before Stanford, he taught middle school science and high school chemistry in Boston, MA and Brooklyn, NY.

Bruce Alberts, PhD, University of California, San Francisco, USA

A prominent biochemist with a strong commitment to the improvement of science and mathematics education, Bruce Alberts, was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in 2014 and the 2016 Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science. Dr. Alberts served as Editor-in-Chief of Science (2009-2013) and as one of the first three United States Science Envoys (2009-2011). He is now the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, to which he returned after serving two six-year terms as the president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Douglas Allchin, PhD, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, USA

Douglas Allchin received his M.S. in Evolutionary Biology and Ph.D. in Conceptual Foundations of Science, both from the University of Chicago (1991). His extensive teaching experience ranges from high school biology (in Washington DC) and college biology (in El Paso), to bioethics (Cornell University), history of science (University of Minnesota) and a handful of innovative interdisciplinary courses along the way.

Dr. Allchin pursues several lines of research. In philosophy of science, he is interested in disagreement and error in science -- and how they are resolved. In history of science, he has explored late phlogistonists, debates about cell energetics, and science in non-Western cultures. In education, he works extensively on integrating history and nature of science into science teaching. He is co-author of Doing Biology (1996) and edits the SHiPS Resource Center website.

Sarit Barzilai, PhD, University of Haifa, Israel

Sarit Barzilai is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Learning, Instruction, and Teacher at the University of Haifa, Israel. She received her BA in philosophy from Tel Aviv University and her MA and PhD  in education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to becoming an academic  researcher, she worked as a designer of online learning environments and was the  Pedagogical Director of the Snunit Center for the Advancement of Web-Based Learning at  the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an NGO serving hundreds of schools throughout Israel.

Barzilai’s primary research interests are understanding and fostering learners' digital  literacy and epistemic thinking so that they can cope with the complexities of twenty-first century knowledge societies. She studies how learners, from elementary school to higher  education, evaluate and integrate online information sources such as websites, YouTube  videos, and digital games on scientific, socio-scientific, social, and historical topics. She  specifically focuses on the challenges of reasoning with and about information sources that  have diverse levels of trustworthiness and that present conflicting claims and perspectives.  Barzilai also studies how learners’ epistemic understandings of knowledge and knowing  develop and how these understandings come into play when they make sense of online  information sources. Her research group engages in the design and investigation of online  learning environments and scaffolds for supporting learners' abilities to make sense of  diverse information sources and fostering epistemic growth. These scaffolds are used by  thousands of students in Israel. The group's most recent project involves the development  and study of an online game that helps promote middle-school students' strategies for  identifying Covid-19 misinformation and their norms of knowledge sharing.

Carl Bergstrom, PhD, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Carl Bergstrom is a professor of biology at the University of Washington and a faculty member at the UW Center for an Informed Public. Trained in evolutionary biology, mathematical population genetics, and epidemiology, Carl is perhaps best known for working crossing field boundaries and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences. The unifying theme that runs through all of Carl’s work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies problems such as how communication evolves, how animals deal with deception, and how the process of evolution by natural selection creates the information that is encoded in genomes. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. In physics and network science, he explores how to extract the relevant information from massive networks comprising tens of millions of nodes, and how information flows through networks of this scale. Within informatics, he studies how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature. Within epidemiology, he studies the interaction between evolutionary and epidemiological processes in the emergence of infectious disease, the role of disease surveillance including rapid testing, and the effects of disinformation on public health.

Carl is the author of the college textbook Evolution (W.W. Norton). Recently, Carl has teamed up with Jevin West on a series of projects focused around teaching quantitative reasoning and information literacy. Together they have developed a high-profile educational website (http://callingbull.org), course materials used at over 100 colleges and universities, and the popular book Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Random House).

Janet Coffey, PhD, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Palo Alto, USA

Janet Coffey has spent her professional career in science education, with longstanding interest in science learning and public engagement in science.

Janet currently works as a Program Director at the Moore Foundation. She leads the foundation’s Curiosity-Driven Science Initiative, a multi-year effort that seeks to engage youth and community members in meaningful science experiences to strengthen interest in, appreciation for, and understanding of science. She also oversees the informal science education portfolio in the San Francisco Bay Area Program. She has been involved in cross-foundation working groups, and helped launch the Moore Inventor Fellows, an effort that provides support to early career scientist- and engineer-inventors.

Before joining the foundation, Janet was on the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research sat at the intersection of learning and assessment, and spanned study of younger children to college student including in- and out-of-school contexts. She began her career in education at the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council before teaching and coaching middle school in Washington, D.C. Janet received her undergraduate degree in human biology from Stanford University, where she also earned a doctorate in science education.

Brian Donovan, PhD, BSCS Science Learning, Colorado, USA

Brian M. Donovan is a senior research scientist at BSCS Science Learning. He holds a B.A. in biology from Colorado College, a M.A. in teaching from the University of San Francisco, and a M.S. in biology and Ph.D. in science education from Stanford University. His research explores how genetics education interacts with social-cognitive biases to influence how students make sense of complex biological and social phenomena. By translating this research into frameworks that inform curriculum, instruction, and teacher education, Brian hopes to create a generation of researchers, teachers, and curriculum writers who know how to teach about human difference in a more humane manner.

Brian’s award-winning educational research (e.g, The 2020 NARST Early Career Research Award, The 2018-2019 Most Downloaded Paper Award for Science Education, The 2017 NSTA Research Worth Reading Award) has been reported on by news outlets in the United States (e.g., The New York Times, The Atlantic/Undark, & EdWeek) and abroad (e.g., The Independent & The Australian Broadcasting System). Currently, he is the principal investigator of three different NSF funded research projects that explore the cognitive, social, and educational factors that link the learning of human genetics to reductions in racism, sexism, and deterministic worldviews that limit human potential. Before his research career, Brian taught middle school science for seven years in San Francisco.

Rena Dorph, PhD, The Lawrence, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

Rena Dorph is the Director of the Lawrence Hall of Science. She has been a part of the Leadership Team at the Hall since 2003, when she joined the Hall as Director of the Research Group. In her role as the Research Group Director, Rena provided leadership and support for the Hall community as well as for organizations who contract with the Group. She continues to serve as the Principal Investigator for multiple grants from Federal agencies and private foundations and is a Founder and Principal Investigator of the Learning Activation Lab.

Rena has worked in the field of educational research and evaluation for over 20 years. Rena’s research has focused on the relationship between learning experiences and outcomes, paying consistent attention to issues of equity, access, and impact. Prior to joining the Hall, Rena served as Director for Research, Policy, and Technology in the Teacher Education and Professional Development Unit of the University of California Office of the President; as an educational consultant for California schools, districts, and county offices of education; as the Lead Researcher and Coordinator for the SB1274 School Restructuring Study based at the University of California, Berkeley; and for the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching at Columbia University/Teachers College in New York City.

Rena received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis; an M.A. in the Sociology of Education from Teachers College at Columbia University; and a Ph.D. in Educational Policy, Organization, Measurement, and Evaluation from University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

Kari Kivinen, PhD, Faktabaari, Finland

Kari Kivinen, PhD is an Education outreach expert at European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), He has over 30 years of experience in international education. Since 2017 he has led the pedagogical development work at Faktabaari EDU digital information literacy service building on fact-checking methodology and co-authored and piloted the learning materials with fellow teachers around Finland and abroad. He has contributed e.g. to the Council of Europe digital learning materials on COVID infodemics.

Anastasia Kozyreva, PhD, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

Anastasia Kozyreva is a researcher at the Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist working on cognitive and ethical implications of digital technologies and artificial intelligence on society. After completing her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 2016, she joined ARC to study rationality and decision-making under uncertainty. Her conceptual research focuses on foundations of risk and uncertainty, bounded rationality, and the challenges that modern digital environments pose to human autonomy and decision making. Her empirical research focuses on public attitudes toward digital technologies and cognitive interventions that could help counteract rising challenges of false information and online manipulation.

Kathy Perkins, PhD, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Dr. Kathy Perkins is Director of the PhET Interactive Simulations Project (https://phet.colorado.edu), a faculty member in Physics, and a fellow of the Center for STEM Learning. Her current work focuses on the design and classroom use of interactive simulations to increase engagement and learning in STEM, and on scaling impact with free, open educational resources. She has worked in the field of STEM education since 2003, reforming undergraduate courses, studying students' beliefs about science, training faculty in new forms of pedagogy, and engaging in institutional change efforts. She directed CU's Science Education Initiative from 2010-16 - a $5 million investment to advance undergraduate STEM education.

Saul Perlmutter, PhD, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His interest in scientific-style critical thinking led to the development of interdisciplinary courses at Cal called Sense and Sensibility and Science and Physics & Music, which he has been teaching to undergraduates for more than a decade. An author of hundreds of articles on cosmology, Professor Perlmutter has also written popular articles and appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries. In addition to other awards and honorary doctorates, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sam Wineburg, PhD, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies at Stanford University. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden’s Umeå University. In 2004, Wineburg founded the Stanford History Education Group (sheg.stanford.edu), a curriculum development effort that has grown into the largest provider of free curriculum in the social studies, with over ten million downloads of its curriculum and assessments. His current research focuses on “Civic Online Reasoning,” or how people judge the credibility of information on the Internet— research that has been reported in Time Magazine, the BBC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, and translated into dozens of languages. 

Wineburg’s scholarship sits at the crossroads of three fields: cognitive psychology, history, and education. His bylines include scholarly journals like Cognitive Science and the Journal of American History as well as popular outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, USAToday, Time Magazine, and the Smithsonian Magazine His 2002 book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for work that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.” In 2013, he was inducted into the National Academy of Education and also named the Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Commission and spent four months crisscrossing India lecturing about his work. In 2018, his research group entered into a partnership with the Poynter Institute and supported by Google.org to create a state-of-the-art curriculum on digital literacy, which has been distributed freely to schools throughout the world. His latest book, Why Learn History When It’s Already on Your Phone, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.