Pamela Cantor, M.D., writes about how human connection and shared rituals can support healing, safety, and well-being for AASA School Administrator.

March 2026

Pamela Cantor, M.D. explains how Thanksgiving rituals activate neural pathways for healing, safety, and well-being, offering an annual reset for mind and body. Originally posted on Psychology Today.

November 26, 2025

In two chapters of the open-source Handbook for Assessment in the Service of Learning, Volume I, Pamela Cantor, MD highlights how assessment can be designed to reveal strengths and shape learning.

Watch highlights from recent Pamela Cantor, M.D. interviews and presentations, featuring her insights on topics including education, human development, and unlocking human potential.

In this episode of The Greatness Machine, Pamela Cantor, M.D. delves deeply into the essence of self-actualization and offers valuable guidance for unlocking the boundless possibilities that lie within each of us.

New insights into the human brain and biology are challenging long-held but false assumptions about talent, learning, and human potential.

March 4, 2024, Austin, Texas

Pamela Cantor, M.D. delivers a talk on the brain's astonishing malleability, and the forces at play to unlock the potential in each and every person.

November 3, 2023, Boise, Idaho

Pamela Cantor, M.D. delivers the keynote address, “A Fierce Sense of Belonging: Fuel for Engagement, Motivation, and Learning”.

July 18–20, 2023, Online

What is it about adolescents and the adolescent brain that makes them particularly vulnerable to stress? And what can we as teachers, parents, and caregivers do to support them?

U.S. Department of Education, National Coordinating Conference

Dec 7, 2022

In part two, Zaretta Hammond outlines practical steps for teachers to become, ideally, personal trainers of cognitive development.

What exactly can the Federal Department of Education do to respond to enduring questions of how to address inequities in funding, academic outcomes, and opportunities when reimagining education in America?

In part 2 of our conversation with Margaret Beale Spencer, the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education at the University of Chicago, we dive deeper into Dr. Spencer’s scientific research on human development and ask her for guidance to address the elephant in many rooms today: racism.

Part 1 of a conversation with Margaret Beale Spencer about human vulnerability, resilience and context, which are concepts that Professor Spencer, University of Chicago, has spent her career studying and addressing.

Race in America is a daily part of nearly every aspect of our lives including, of course, education. And that intersection where race, identity, equity and education all meet—that’s where Na’ilah Suad Nasir has dedicated her research, action, and career.

As the Science of Learning and Development becomes better understood—the discoveries that connect how children develop and learn and how their environments can make or break their progress—a challenge becomes clear: turning that research into practice.

Today we have scientific knowledge about learning, development, and talent that didn’t exist when many of the systems that serve children, in and out of school, were designed.

Enhancing the Lives of All Young People.

A synthesis of the role of relationships and key macro and micro-contexts—poverty, racism, families, communities, schools, and peers—in supporting and/or undermining the healthy development of children and youth, using a relational developmental systems framework.