Biography
Born in Yonkers, NY and raised in Santa Monica, CA, I graduated from UCLA, moved to Canada to work, married, and raised 5 children on a farm in Crescent Valley, BC before coming to NIC in 1991. I retired from NIC in 2020 and am back teaching one class for this semester. I have been married to my sweetheart for 53 years.
My dual academic passion is how to study in college and the human brain. How to study in college was the biggest mystery to me until I began to study memory in 1992 while in graduate school (I nearly flunked out of college because I kept on using my old high school methods which did not work and never figured it out). So I barely made it with a 2.2 GPA and Ronald Regan’s signature on my diploma (he was California governor at the time).
In 2000 my husband and I wrote a book, Study Sense: What Memory Research Tells Us About Studying in College that reduces study time dramatically while helping us see what students need to be successful. The 4th edition is now in print as a textbook for freshman experience courses. (Hint: most traditional study techniques like flash cards, taking extensive notes and highlighting violate how the brain learns.)
The human brain has been my passion ever since I had biological psychology as a college freshman. I even spent a summer volunteering at the UCLA Brain Research Institute running cats and rats in brain experiments without computers or calculators, using equipment that looked like colored spaghetti. It is interesting how much we can understand about human behavior and thought just by understanding brain development.
