Johns Hopkins launches multidisciplinary center to explore learning

A new multidisciplinary institute has been formed at Johns Hopkins to shed light on all aspects of learning, from how our minds begin to take shape during infancy, to how individual differences affect learning, to how we can benefit from cutting-edge teaching technologies.

The newly formed Science of Learning Institute will support research and application that seeks to understand learning at all levels—What changes occur in the brain through learning? How do development and aging affect our ability to learn? How do neurological and psychiatric diseases alter or inhibit learning?

The creation of the institute was announced earlier today by President Ronald J. Daniels and interim Provost Jonathan A. Bagger in an email message to faculty, staff, and students.

"We look forward to the day when every person in every phase of life, from infancy and throughout adulthood, can take advantage of a new, transformative science of learning," Daniels and Bagger wrote in their message, "one in which a broad and deep understanding of how learning occurs allows us to maximize our society's most precious capital, the human potential to learn."

Barbara Landau, vice provost of faculty affairs and a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, will lead the institute. It will include faculty members from the schools of Arts and Sciences, Education, Medicine, Engineering, and Public Health, along with researchers from the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

For more information about the institute and its activities, including the RFPs and deadlines for submission of proposals, please visit the Johns Hopkins Science of Learning website.