2017 International Science of Learning Conference

Featured speakers


Keynote Speakers


Professor Andrew Meltzoff

Professor Andrew Meltzoff holds the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair and is the Co-Director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington. He is a pioneer in the study of infant and child development and has demonstrated the power of role models and social learning for young children’s development. His studies on elementary school children’s cultural stereotypes about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) have far-reaching implications for the science of learning. This research work shows that non-academic factors profoundly influence STEM learning. It is helping to bring together psychological science and educational practice at national and international levels.

A/Prof Paul Dux

A/Prof Paul E. Dux is a psychologist and neuroscientist in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland. He leads a group that studies the cognitive and neural underpinnings of human information-processing capacity limitations in health and disease. Specific interests are the mechanisms of attention and the efficacy of cognitive training and how it changes the brain to improve performance. Dux has published widely, received several early career research awards and attracted funding from both the ARC and NHMRC.

Professor John Hattie

Professor John Hattie is Director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne. His areas of interest are measurement models and their applications to educational problems, and models of teaching and learning. Professor Hattie is a Theme Leader in the Australian Research Council’s national Science of Learning Research Centre and was appointed as Chair of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership in 2014.


Plenary Speakers


Professor Roberto Lent

Roberto Lent is Professor of Neuroscience at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He conducts studies on neuroplasticity, neurodevelopment and evolution of the nervous system, employing different techniques, from cell biology to neuroimaging. He is a Full Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and General Coordinator of the Brazilian Network of Science for Education, constituted by scientists of all disciplines to foster translational research applied to learning and other educational matters.

Professor Nancy Law

Professor Nancy Law is a professor in the Division of Information Technology in Education, Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. She served as the Founding Director for the Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE) for 15 years from 1998. Her key research focus is on studying technology-enhanced pedagogical innovations for learning at student, teacher and school levels for scalable change at institutional and system levels. She is currently leading a major interdisciplinary research project on learning and assessment of digital citizenship from childhood to early adulthood.

Dr Melina Uncapher

Dr Melina Uncapher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at University of California, San Francisco, and is Director of the Education Program at the new Neuroscape Center at UCSF.  Dr Uncapher’s research focus is on understanding how attention affects learning, and how this knowledge can be used to solve real-world problems. Dr Uncapher is Executive Director of the Institute for Applied Neuroscience, a science-for-good nonprofit that partners with educators and students to solve education challenges using practical tools based on the science of learning.

Dr Johan Mårtensson

Dr Johan Mårtensson is a Researcher at the Department of Clinical Sciences at Lund University, a position that straddles the Division of Logopedics, Phoniatrics, and Audiology, the Humanities Laboratory and the National 7T facility. Johan’s background is in neuropsychology, with focus on multi modal MRI and longitudinal studies into brain change; a topic that has taken him from Lund to the Max Planck for Human Development in Berlin and back. Johan is a member and representative of the research community Cognition, Communication and Learning (CCL) which is a multidisciplinary and cross-faculty research environment which brings together 40 researchers, post docs and PhD students from Cognitive Science, Psychology, Lingiustics, Neurophysiology and Logopedics, Phoniatrics and Audiology.