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

Pamela Cantor, M.D., explains the biology of learning and its connection to belonging in this video from History Co:Lab as part of the Building Belonging Project, a product of the Jacobs Foundation and New America’s Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) fellowship.

A research synthesis by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Pamela Cantor, M.D., and Hirokazu Yoshikawa offers a conceptual foundation for rethinking the nature of learning, the work of teaching, and the purpose and design of schools and youth-facing policies.

Pamela Cantor, M.D. explains what working memory is, how it works, why it's the gateway to learning, and the forces, including social media, that impede its critical function.

Pamela Cantor, M.D. discusses the inequities of the current education system and proposes a new vision for learning grounded in whole-child development.

Click here to access all of the articles Pamela Cantor, M.D. has written for Psychology Today.

A framework for the development of skills children need for success in school and beyond.

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

July 18–20, 2023, Online

Human Variation and How People Learn

May 4, 2023

In a keynote speech, Pamela Cantor, M.D. explores how human connections wire the brain and fuel learning.

April 21-23, 2023

Featured Session: How New Attention to R&D Will Transform Learning

March 6–9, 2023

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?

Reimagining education in the United States.

Is the stress of the holiday season wearing you down? Here's a way out.

Stressed out? Here are simple ways to protect your mind and body from illness and injury.

New research in youth and adolescent development and what it means for creating learning contexts that truly support and nurture the whole child.

What you think you know about adolescents might just be plain wrong.

Does an environment that is equitable for one child necessarily mean it becomes unequitable for another? Where is the balance, and how does it get struck?

What if children find themselves in spaces that teacher, educator, and author Zaretta Hammond calls “inequitable by design,” that prevent instead of promote safety and belonging?

Putting the Science of Learning and Development Into Action

How children develop through a system of dynamic relationships and the collective set of contexts that they experience across their life spans.

When it comes to learning and thriving during the pandemic, many students have faced one obstacle after another—including lack of access to high-speed internet and devices, disconnection from teachers and friends, and the cancellation of sports, clubs and church choirs. But where many people see obstacles, Hal Smith sees opportunity.

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.

The 45-minute docu-training film featuring Pamela Cantor, M.D., aims to help educators mitigate the effects of grief, trauma, and emotional stressors facing students amidst the uncertainty of COVID-19.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pamela Cantor, M.D. offers a framework for educators and parents to manage and surmount stress, the 3 R's, relationships, routines, and resilience.

Mention innovation in America, and what comes to mind? Silicon Valley? NASA? Tech firms? Not for Jim Shelton. He thinks: education. In fact, he wonders: Why, as we learn more about the science of learning and development, shouldn’t education—like, say, the military—have a full research and development infrastructure?

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.

If, as the saying goes, learning happens everywhere, how can our community based programs—the ones outside the classroom that serve and engage our children and youth—use the Science of Learning and Development to rethink and redesign what kids do after the end of school bell rings?

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 research synthesis by Linda Darling-Hammond aimed at educators.

The research is clear: Strong relationships with educators help students develop the cognitive skills they need to learn and thrive.

Pamela Cantor, M.D. reflects on the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the impact that is having on the sense of safety.

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.

A synthesis of foundational knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines regarding how humans develop in context.

This two-hour documentary explores the science of learning, including research and insights from neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators working to reimagine the future of education—Pamela Cantor, M.D., and teachers from Fairmont Neighborhood School in the Bronx, among them!