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

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

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.

Jeff Dieffenbach | Associate Director, MIT Integrated Learning Initiative

Jeff Dieffenbach is the Associate Director of the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative, which funds, connects, and shares research on effective human learning across birth-preK, pK-12, higher education, and workforce learning. Previously, Jeff has served in senior product management, business development, sales, and marketing roles across a range of education companies. In addition, Jeff served for ten years as an elected school board member in a suburban town west of Boston. Jeff has master’s degrees in Technology and Policy and in Materials Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jeff Mentch | Graduate Student

Jeff is a PhD student in the Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology. His research focuses on applying machine learning approaches to large open naturalistic fMRI datasets. His has experience in fields including eye-tracking, VR, autism, Alzheimer’s clinical trials, music, and marine biology.

Jesse Dalton | Data Management Specialist, Center for Education Policy Research

Jesse Dalton is a data management specialist at CEPR. Previously, he worked as a research analyst at the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy, where he managed data and ran analyses across multiple projects. His work included creating and cleaning physician group data to measure the effectiveness of accountable care organizations, defining hospice chains to examine the expansion of the for-profit hospice sector, and analyzing the effects of mergers and acquisitions on patient experiences at acquired hospitals. He graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in economics and international relations and a M.A. in economics.

Joanna Christodoulou | Associate Professor

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

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 | READS Lab Project Manager

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

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.

John Richards | Lecturer on Education

John Richards is a senior executive in education, technology and media with extensive experience in business development and strategic planning. He is an internationally recognized leader in merging media and technology with educational needs, and has designed and published award-winning educational materials in mathematics, science, and social studies. He is currently President of Consulting Services for Education (CS4Ed), which provides strategic planning and product development for such clients as Discovery Education, AGS Publishing, PBS TeacherLine, and WGBH Teacher Domain. Previously, he was President of the JASON Foundation for Education, and Senior Vice President and General Manager of Turner Learning, Inc., the education arm of Turner Broadcasting. Richards received his doctorate in Philosophy at SUNY Buffalo in 1971, and conducted post-doctoral research at SUNY in Mathematics in 1972.

John Tournas | Doctoral Candidate and Research Assistant

John Tournas is a Cambridge native who graduated from HGSE in November of 2020 with his Ed.M. He is an educator and musician who has taught Electronic Music Production in schools and libraries throughout NYC. He also taught 6th Grade English at Bronx Community Charter School. He is looking forward to expanding his skills as an educator through his collaboration with Reach Every Reader. 

Jon Fullerton | Executive Director, Center for Education Policy Research

Jon Fullerton is the executive director of CEPR. Jon has extensive experience working with policymakers and executives in designing and implementing organizational change and improvements. Before coming to Harvard, Jon served as the Board of Education’s director of budget and financial policy for the Los Angeles Unified School District. In this capacity, he provided independent evaluations of district reforms and helped to ensure that the district’s budget was aligned with board priorities. From 2002 to 2005 he was vice-president of strategy, evaluation, research, and policy at the Urban Education Partnership in Los Angeles, where he worked with policymakers to ensure that they focused on high impact educational strategies. Jon previously worked for five years at McKinsey & Company as a strategy consultant. He has a PhD in government and an A.B. in social studies, both from Harvard.

Jonny Adler | Research Assistant

Jonny Adler is a social studies and humanities educator from New York City. After graduating with his Ed.M from HGSE in 2020, Jonny taught middle schoolers in the northeast Bronx for three years. Jonny is looking forward to learning more about teaching and learning—as well as research methods and processes—at Reach Every Reader.

Josh Gilbert | Senior Researcher, READS Lab

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.