Marina Umaschi Bers is an associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She is also a scientific research associate at Boston Children's Hospital. Her research involves the design and study of innovative l earning technologies to promote childrens positive development.
At Tufts, Prof. Bers heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group and collaborates with Tufts' Center for Educational Engineering Outreach (CEEO) .
Dr. Bers is from Argentina, where she did her undergraduate studies in Social Communication at Buenos Aires University. In 1994 she came to the US where she received a Master's degree in Educational Media and Technology from Boston University and a Master of Science and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory working with Seymour Papert. Dr. Bers is married and has three children.
Prof. Bers received the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor given by the U.S. government to outstanding investigators at the early stages of their careers. She also received a National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Young Investigator's *Career Award *, a five-year grant to support her work on virtual communities of learning and care, and the American Educational Research Associations (AERA) * Jan Hawkins Award* which is given for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies.
Over the past forteen years, Prof. Bers has conceived and designed diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds. She conducted studies after school programs, museums and hospitals, as well as schools in the US, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Costa Rica and Thailand. She also teaches seminars on learning technologies for educators in many of these countries and does consulting on ways to use technology to promote positive youth development. Her book "Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom"" has been published by Teacher's College Press in 2008.
