Danielle McNamara

Danielle S. McNamara, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Learning Engineering Institute, a Regents Professor in the Department of Psychology, and Director of the Science of Learning and Educational Technology (SoLET) Lab. She is an international expert in fields related to learning engineering, including cognitive and learning sciences, comprehension, writing, natural language processing (NLP), intelligent tutoring, and artificial intelligence in education. She and her team have developed several intelligent tutoring systems, including iSTART and Writing Pal, for comprehension and writing instruction and practice. Research on these technologies have explored methods for improving student engagement via game-based practice, enhanced adaptability functions, and assessed the feasibility and usability of these systems in real world settings such as high school classrooms. Dr. McNamara has also led the development and testing of multiple NLP tools that have been used in various contexts and learning environments involving essay writing, reading comprehension, second language learning, and creativity. Such tools allow for quick, efficient, and reliable analyses of large text corpora, which is particularly relevant and valuable when analyzing big data. She is a member of the National Academy of Education, and she is Fellow of APS, AERA, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Society for Text and Discourse. She is the founding Editor of APA Technology, Mind, & Behavior, and served as associate editor for the Cognitive Science Journal, Journal of Educational Psychology, Learning & Instruction, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, and is a founding AE of Topics in Cognitive Science.