Ron Tzur (PhD) is a professor of mathematics education at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Education and Human Development. Ron’s research focuses on children’s construction of early number and fractional knowledge, on mathematics teachers’ professional development (including implications of brain research for their practice), and on linking mathematical thinking/learning with brain processes. 

Ron has served as a PI on a collaborative, preliminary research project with Dr. Brendan Depue (CU Boulder), using fMRI to study how the brain processes whole numbers and fraction

Ron currently serves as a Principal Investigator on the 4-year, $3,000,000 NSF-funded project, “Student-Adaptive Pedagogy for Elementary Teachers: Promoting Multiplicative and Fractional Reasoning to Improve Students’ Preparedness for Middle School Mathematics.” This project implements and studies a professional development (PD) intervention designed to shift upper elementary teachers’ mathematics teaching toward a constructivist approach, called student-adaptive pedagogy (AdPed), which adapts teaching goals and activities based on students’ conceptions and experiences – and measure the impact of that shift on students’ learning and outcomes.

Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa is from Berkeley, California and teaches a course at the Harvard University Extension School entitled Neuroscience of Learning: An Introduction to Mind, Brain, Health and Education.

She is the Associate Editor of the Nature Partner Journal Science of Learning and is currently an educational researcher affiliated with the Latin American Social Science Research Faculty (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador. She is a former member of the Organisation For Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) expert panel to redefine Teachers’ New Pedagogical Knowledge which determined teacher need more training in Technology and Neuroscience. Tracey is the founder of Connections: The Learning Sciences Platform, which provides evidence-based resources to teachers. Connections and MESH, a UK-based charity, have constructed a new, free, online, evidence-based platform to help fill in gaps of pedagogical knowledge for the 21st century, which was presented to the UNESCO 10th Policy Dialogue on the Teaching Profession. 

Tracey has taught Kindergarten through University and is the former Director of the Institute for Teaching and Learning (IDEA) and Director of Online Learning at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and founding Dean of Education at the American University in Quito. Her office seeks to improve the quality of education through research, teacher training and student support. Tracey’s vision is to better the social, democratic and economic structures of countries through a better educated population. Tracey also works with schools around the world in 40 different countries.

Her research areas include improved indicators to measure educational quality; learning in the digital age; the expansion of the field of Mind, Brain and Education; paradigm changes using appropriate technologies; bilingualism and multilingualism; and the general improvement of teacher training practices in which she has written eight academic books, several chapters in books, and dozens of indexed articles. Tracey's vision is to improve the social, democratic and economic structures of countries through a better educated population. She believes that the quality of education is improved through research, teacher education, and student support.

Cindy is a career educator who has worked with a broad range of children and families at various stages of their educational experience. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia (BA Biology, Environmental Sciences), New York University (MA Childhood Education), and Teachers College, Columbia University (MS Neuroscience and Education).

Currently a third-year doctoral candidate in Early Childhood Education at Teachers College, Cindy is investigating teacher warmth and stress in relation to children’s ability to regulate emotion in the early childhood classroom.

In the future, she hopes to continue to more closely link neuroscience and practices of curriculum and teaching in efforts to further enrich children’s early experiences and promote developmental outcomes.