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Assistant Professor |
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Assistant Professor |
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Research || Teaching || Publications || C.V (last updated 9/07) || In the News
I am an assistant professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development with a secondary appointment in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. I am also associate scientific staff at Boston Children's Hospital. My research interests include the design and study of new technologies for promoting positive youth development in hospitals and mental health care settings, schools and after-school programs. I am particularly interested in collaborative virtual environments and the impact of new technologies for personal, social and moral development.
At Tufts I am working on a new multidisciplinary program on Math, Science, Engineering and Technology
Education (MSTE) that involves Child Development as well
as Computer Science, the School of Engineering
and the School of
Education, amongst others.
As part of the MSTE program, I also lead the early childhood educational research efforts at the Center for Engineering Educational Outreach (CEEO) . Within the Dept. of Child Development, my work is strongly related to the M.A. and Ph.D. concentration of studies on New Technologies and Human Development offered by the department.
My research focuses on two different, but related, areas that aim at understanding the potential of new technologies for improving the lives of young people:
The NSF funded project (NSF Career Award # 0447166) Virtual Communities of Learning and Care and the Early Childhood Technology .
My new book "Blocks to Robots" Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom" has just been published by Teacher's College Press. You can find it in Amazon
here.
Although both research programs look at children in different age ranges (adolescents and early childhood) and use different technologies (virtual environments and robotics), both focus on the potential of new technologies to help children both to learn new things in new ways using the power of computation, but also to develop in a positive way as contributors to society.
In July 2005 I received the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor given by the US government to promising and groundbreaking investigators who are starting their independent careers. Many news articles, both in he US and in Argentina were written about this work resulting from my
NSF's Young Investigator’s Career Award, a five-year grant to support my work on virtual communities of learning and care. In 2005, I was aalso warded the American Educational Research Association (AERA)’s Jan Hawkins Award which is given for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies.
In May 2001 I received my Ph.D from the MIT Media-
Lab, where I worked with Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick and Sherry Turkle. . My thesis is called “Identity Construction Environments:
The Design of Computational Tools for exploring a Sense of Self and Moral Values” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory. Cambridge:MA. (abstract in html format). [complete thesis in PDF]. I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I did my undergradute studies at Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Research || Teaching || Publications || C.V (last updated 9/07)|| In the News