Paul van den Broek is Professor of Education and Child Studies at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and Professor in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Minnesota. At the University of Minnesota he was Guy Bond Professor in Reading Research and for many years served as director of the interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Sciences. His research interests concern the cognitive and neurological foundations of reading and learning. With his collaborators, he investigates the processes involved in language comprehension, text comprehension, and learning from text, and in the development of these processes from early childhood to adulthood. In addition, he has a strong interest in the application of cognitive-psychological models to educational practice. In his investigations, he uses behavioral methodologies, computational modeling, and, recently, neuro-imaging techniques. He has served on the editorial boards for Journal of Educational Psychology, Reading Research Quarterly, Discourse Processes, Memory & Cognition, as well as on grant review panels for several US and international agencies. He was associate editor of Scientific Study of Reading, responsible for reading comprehension. In addition, he has been consultant on issues of policy and research for the US government. He has published extensively in scientific journals and books, and has co-edited several books. He is Fellow in the Society for Text & Discourse.

Dr. van den Broek received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985) and. Master’s degrees in Developmental Psychology (1980) and in Experimental Psychology (1981) from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands.

After graduation from the University of Chicago, Dr. van den Broek took a faculty position at the University of Kentucky in cognitive psychology and in 1987 relocated to the University of Minnesota to take a position in educational psychology. At both universities he received teaching awards