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Kurzweil Educational Systems Inc. Educational Advisory Board (EAB)

The EAB will serve to advise Kurzweil Educational on literacy research, and educational practice, policy and emerging issues; foster new research studies to determine the efficacy of assistive technology in a variety of settings and applications, and; provide expert guidance on future technologies.

The Advisory Board is comprised of distinguished leaders in the fields of literacy research and education and includes:

• Dr. Lynn Fuchs, Professor in the Department of Special Education at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University specializing in classroom-based assessment and reading instruction
• Dr. Lynda Katz, President of Landmark College, an institution exclusively for students with learning disabilities and AD/HD, and an expert in rehabilitation sciences and psychology
• Charles A. MacArthur, Professor at the University of Delaware's School of Education, and researcher and author in the fields of writing instruction and learning disabilities
• Richard K. Olson, Professor of Psychology at University of Colorado and an expert on the etiology and remediation of reading disabilities.

Dr. Lynn Fuchs

Dr. Lynn Fuchs is Professor in the Department of Special Education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. She received her Ph.D. in educational psychology, with emphasis in special education, from the University of Minnesota, where she worked at the Institute for Research on Learning Disabilities. She was a special education teacher in the Minneapolis Public Schools for 5 years and a first-grade teacher in Pennsylvania. For the past 20 years, Dr. Fuchs has conducted research on classroom-based assessment and instructional methods to enhance outcomes for students with disabilities. She also co-directs the Vanderbilt Reading Clinic, which provides intensive reading instruction to students with severe reading disabilities and designs sophisticated evaluation methods to track and account for student growth. She has over 150 publications on assessment systems and instruction. She was the co-editor of The Journal of Special Education for 15 years and currently serves on the boards of 10 journals. In l998, L. Fuchs was the co-recipient of the Mayor's Award: Educator of the Year (Nashville, TN) and won the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award for the best article in an American Educational Research Association journal. She was also the recipient of the Samuel Kirk award for Best Practice Article in Learning Disabilities Research and Practice (2000), of the School Psychology Review Best Article of the Year award (2001), and of the Career Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children.

Dr. Lynda Katz

Dr. Katz has been President of Landmark College since 1994. Prior to that she was on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry for 20 plus years, holding joint appointments with the Schools of Education and Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. She also holds an adjunct appointment with West Virginia University's Program in Counseling Psychology. Dr. Katz is a Fellow in the International College of Prescribing Psychologists, a Fellow in the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, and a Fellow in the National Academy of Neuropsychology. Dr. Katz has authored and co-authored countless refereed articles, book chapters and other publications in the areas of psychiatric rehabilitation, mental retardation, rights of the developmentally disabled, vocational assessment, achievement testing, learning disabilities, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Most currently she is co-author of the book Learning Disabilities in Older Adolescents and Adults: Clinical Utility of the Neuropsychological Perspective.

Charles A. MacArthur

Charles A. MacArthur is Professor of Special Education in the School of Education at the University of Delaware where he teaches courses on literacy instruction for students with disabilities as well as courses on technology applications. His major research interests include writing instruction for students with learning disabilities, applications of technology to support reading and writing, development of self-regulated strategies, and understanding learning processes in inclusive classrooms. Major funded research projects have focused on development of a writing curriculum for students with learning disabilities, writing strategy instruction in classroom settings, development of multimedia tools to support reading and writing in content areas, speech recognition as a writing accommodation, and project-based learning in social studies in inclusive classrooms.

Richard K. Olson

Professor Olson received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Oregon in 1970. Since then he has been a faculty member at the University of Colorado, where he is now Professor of Psychology, a Fellow of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities. He is a charter member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and currently serves as President. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, the Journal of Learning Disabilities, and the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Professor Olson's research since 1980 has focused on the etiology and remediation reading disabilities. Data from identical and fraternal twins have been used to assess he genetic and environmental influence on reading and related language deficits. The remediation of reading and language deficits has been explored through the use of computers in the Boulder schools. Most recently, Professor Olson began a 5-year longitudinal preschool twin study for developmental genetic analyses of reading and attention.