Meet the Team

Jackie E. Relyea | Assistant Professor, NC State University, College of Education

Jackie E. Relyea served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the READS Lab at Harvard. Her research focuses on academic language and literacy development of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Her current research involves investigating a classroom-based intervention model that emphasizes the integration of literacy instruction in content-area subjects to develop language-minority students’ domain-specific knowledge, academic language and literacy, and higher-order thinking skills. Prior to joining to the READS lab, she held research positions at various research institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, MetaMetrics Inc., and the University of Houston. She is currently an assistant professor of literacy education at North Carolina State University.

James S. Kim | Professor, HGSE

Jimmy Kim studies the effectiveness of literacy reforms and interventions in improving student outcomes. He leads the the READS Lab (Research Enhances Adaptations Designed for Scale in Literacy), a research-based collaborative initiative to identify and scale adaptive solutions for improving children’s literacy learning opportunities and outcomes. He is an expert in conducting randomized field trials to evaluate, improve, and scale evidence-based literacy reforms. He is the principal investigator of an Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) validation study to evaluate READS for Summer Learning, a low-cost and large-scale summer reading intervention for improving reading comprehension outcomes in high-poverty elementary schools. He has also led experimental studies of several widely used teacher professional development interventions for improving reading and writing outcomes in the elementary and secondary grades, including the Pathway Project, Teacher Study Groups, and the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention. He serves on the editorial boards of Reading Research Quarterly and the Journal of Educational Psychology and was the program chair for the 2014 annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Jamie Quinn | Research Faculty, FSU

Jamie Quinn earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in August of 2016 at Florida State University. After completing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship position at the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at The University of Texas at Austin, Jamie joined the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) as a postdoctoral research scholar in fall of 2017, and accepted a research faculty position in the spring of 2018. Jamie is a methodologist and budding psychometrician on the Reach Every Reader project.

Joanna Christodoulou | Professor, MGH Institute of Health Professions

Joanna Christodoulou is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who studies reading development and difficulties. She is Associate Professor at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston, MA, as well as Research Associate at MIT with the Gabrieli Lab, and adjunct faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Joanna works at the intersection of education and neuroscience. Her research focuses on the brain and behavior correlates of reading, as well as intervention approaches for struggling learners. Her research has been supported by organizations including the Spencer Foundation; the Fulbright Foundation; the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative at Harvard; the National Science Foundation; and the National Institutes of Health. She has worked directly with children delivering reading instruction, taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and has led professional development workshops for educators and parents internationally. She earned an MA in applied child development from Tufts University, an Ed.M. in Mind, Brain, and Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), and an Ed.D. from HGSE.

Joe Blatt | Senior Lecturer on Education, HGSE

Joe Blatt is interested in the effects of media content and technology on development, learning, and civic behavior. As principal investigator for Reach Every Reader’s pre-K home and family engagement strand, Joe is overseeing the development of apps that parents and young children can use together to support the foundations of early literacy.

Joe’s expertise in children’s media has led to consulting and advising relationships with many major production companies, including Sesame Workshop, WGBH, Walden Media, PBS Kids, and Pokemon. Before serving as executive producer of Scientific American Frontiers, the PBS magazine series starring Alan Alda, Joe made documentaries for the NOVA science series. He also created the BreakThrough television series to profile contemporary African American, Latino, and Native American scientists and engineers.

Johanna Tvedt | Project Manager, READS Lab, HGSE

Johanna Tvedt came to the READS Lab from Harvard’s Project Zero, where she worked as a Research Assistant on a national study of how different groups think about the goals of college. Her primary focus is issues of social mobility and equity in the field of education, and she has previously coordinated an educational program for immigrant women at the MiRA Centre in Norway, and worked as a teacher and coordinator of a study abroad program in San Francisco. She holds an M.A. in International Studies from the University of San Francisco.

John Gabrieli | Professor, MIT

John Gabrieli has faculty appointments in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. He is Director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute and a Principal Investigator in that Institute. He also has appointments in the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Josh Gilbert | Senior Researcher, READS Lab, HGSE

Josh Gilbert received his Bachelor of Music degree at New England Conservatory and completed his Master of Education degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in its Arts in Education program in 2017.  Josh’s research experience includes work with the Center for Music and the Arts in Education, Harvard Project Zero, and Harvard’s READS Lab. Josh’s academic publications have appeared in Arts Education Policy Review, and most recently, a chapter in Music Learning as Youth Development co-authored with Dr. Lawrence Scripp. Currently, Josh is working with Dr. Scripp on a comprehensive early-childhood music curriculum for MindChamps PreSchools in Southeast Asia.