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SESSION TYPE: Featured Speaker (Panel) SESSION TITLE: Science All Around: With Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train: STRAND: STEM DAY: Saturday TIME: 11:15 - 12:30pm LOCATION: Sutton Parlor South, 2nd floor |
***BOOK SIGNING AT ONSITE BARNES & NOBLE BOOKSTORE TO FOLLOW SESSION (click here for schedule)
BIOGRAPHY
Kimberly Brenneman, PhD, is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University and at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Kimberly is an author of Preschool Pathways to Science (PrePS): Facilitating Scientific Ways of Thinking, Talking, Doing, and Understanding (2009, Brookes Publishing) and serves as educational consultant to PBS’s Sid the Science Kid television show and website.
Rochel Gelman, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science and the Co-Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). She is recognized for her pioneering research about what infants and preschool children know or learn with relative ease,. Her honors include membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science. She joins her basic research agenda and commitment to a domain-specific theory with her collaborations with school and museums in efforts to create science/math learning environments. Her book (with Brenneman, Macdonald and Ramon) represents her most extensive effort to date. Her studies of these community settings have include museums and schools, which she characterizes as her “other laboratories of learning”, as compared more traditional experimental settings.
As an author, Jordan D. Brown’s award-winning books include Micro Mania (Imagine, 2009), a close-up look at bacteria, bedbugs and other gross little creatures, and Robo World (Joseph Henry Press, 2005), a biography of a robot designer. He has served as an Educational Consultant for many children’s shows including Dinosaur Train. Visit him at www.jordandbrown.com
Scott Sampson is a Canadian-born dinosaur paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and educator who presently serves as Research Curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah. After receiving his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Toronto in 1993, he spent a year working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, followed by five years as assistant professor of anatomy at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine on Long Island. From 1999-2007, he held a dual position with the Utah Museum of Natural History and the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah, serving for the last several years of that period as chief curator and associate professor, respectively. His research has focused on the ecology and evolution of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs, and he has conducted fieldwork in a number of countries, including Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Madagascar, Mexico, the United States, and Canada. His current research efforts are focused on a large scale project in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, southern Utah, which has yielded abundant remains of a previously unknown assemblage of dinosaurs. Sampson has published numerous scientific and popular articles, and has lectured extensively to audiences of all ages on dinosaurs and evolution.
In 2007, Sampson moved to the San Francisco Bay Area of California. In addition to continuing dinosaur research through the University of Utah, he is now pursuing a range of new projects focused on education. Sampson was the primary scientific consultant and on-air host of the four-part Discovery Channel series Dinosaur Planet. Appearing as “Dr. Scott the Paleontologist,” he is presently serving the same pair of roles for the PBS children’s series called Dinosaur Train, produced by the Jim Henson Company. Sampson recently completed a book, Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life (University of California Press, 2009), the first comprehensive review of dinosaur paleontology for a general audience in more than two decades. He is now at work on another general audience book, this one arguing for a radical shift in worldviews as a key factor in resolving the current sustainability crisis.
