John D. Bransford

Who is John D. Bransford?

Dr. John D. Bransford holds the Shauna C. LarsonUniversity Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Bransford is also Co-Principal Investigator and Director of The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments Center, an National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center.

The University of Washington, Stanford University, and SRI International received funding from the NSF for a five-year research center on the science of learning. The LIFE Center seeks to understand and advance human learning through a simultaneous focus on implicit, informal, and formal learning, thus cultivating generalizable interdisciplinary theories that can guide the design of effective new technologies and learning environments.

Previously, Dr. Bransford was Centennial Professor of Psychology and Education and Co-Director of the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University. Early works by Bransford and his colleagues in the 1970s included research in the areas of human learning, memory and problem solving, which helped shape the "cognitive revolution" in psychology. Author of seven books and hundreds of articles and presentations, Bransford is an internationally renowned scholar in cognition and technology.