A Blueprint for Developing a 21st Century Worker

Betsy Hill is an experienced educator and President of BrainWare Learning Company. She has studied the application of neuroscience to teaching and learning with Dr. Patricia Wolfe and other experts and works with educators, clinicians and corporate trainers on using neuroscience research to address some of the most perplexing problems in education, including closing the gap for historically underperforming students. She addressed issues of college and career preparedness as a trustee and board chair at Chicago State University. She holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and an MBA from Northwestern University, and teaches strategy at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and the University of Illinois Chicago.

I like to describe myself as a "recovering" educator, but the truth is that I am more excited than ever about what neuroscience is uncovering about the brain and how we can use that information to enable each individual to reach his or her cognitive potential. I'm here to share what I've been learning over the last ten years and to continue learning from others in this amazing and fast developing field.

Roger Stark is an accomplished entrepreneur and founder and CEO of The BrainWare Company. For the last decade, he has championed the effort to bring cognitive skills development within reach of everyone. He started with a very basic question: What do we know about the brain? From that initial question, he proceeded to pioneer the effort to build an effective and affordable cognitive skills development program. He led the team that developed BrainWare SAFARI, which would become the leading cognitive skills development software program in education, winning many awards including the prestigious CODiE award as best education game or simulation. He was the first person ever invited to deliver a Congressional briefing on the application of neuroscience in education (Neuroscience in the Classroom), and was the stimulus for a policy brief published by the National Association of Directors of Special Education that put special education and neuroscience in the same sentence for the first time., His vision of combining clinical therapy with video-game technology has been validated by peer-reviewed published research and field studies, demonstrating both cognitive gains and transfer of cognitive improvement to academic and workplace performance. A world-renowned academic in the field of brain and education recently said to Roger, “Your research is so powerful, we just can’t ignore you anymore.”