Pamela Cantor, M.D. practiced child and adolescent psychiatry for nearly two decades, specializing in trauma. She founded Turnaround for Children in 2002, after co-authoring a study on the impact of the 9/11 attacks on NYC schoolchildren. In schools with high concentrations of children growing up in poverty, she saw students deeply affected by the adverse circumstances in their everyday lives, teachers struggling to meet the variable and often intense needs of their students, and principals who were unable to build environments that were safe and supportive. She recognized that the research from the fields of developmental and learning science, adversity science, and mental health on stress and the developing brain she had studied in medical school needed to be shared and translated for the systems that develop and educate our children.
Today, Turnaround translates scientific knowledge about how children develop and learn into integrated tools, resources, and services for educators, school leaders, and school systems to establish the conditions and practices that drive learning and growth so that all students thrive.
In 2016, Turnaround published “Building Blocks for Learning,” a framework for comprehensive student development. The paper explores the roots of higher-order skills and mindsets, such as agency, perseverance, and academic tenacity that all children need to flourish and suggests a path to acquire them. In 2017, Dr. Cantor co-authored “Building the Bridge Between Science and Practice: Essential Characteristics of a Translational Framework” in the journal Mind, Brain and Education. In 2018, Applied Developmental Science published two papers co-authored by Dr. Cantor, “Malleability, Plasticity, and Individuality: How Children Learn and Develop in Context” and “Drivers of Human Development: How Relationships and Context Shape Learning and Development.” Together, the papers synthesize research from multiple disciplines on what can be done to help all children develop in healthy ways, no matter the adversity they might experience as they grow up.
Dr. Cantor is a governing partner of the Science of Learning and Development Alliance, a collaborative effort focused on elevating science, advancing equity, and transforming education that is governed by the partner organizations Turnaround for Children, American Institutes for Research, the Forum for Youth Investment, Learning Policy Institute, EducationCounsel, and Populace.
She has shared her insights at events including the ASU + GSV Summit, iNACOL (Aurora Institute) Symposium, Aspen Ideas Festival, Education Writers Association National Seminar, NewSchools Summit, Learning and the Brain, SXSWedu, and EdSurge Fusion. Her work has been highlighted in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and on NOVA and National Public Radio. In 2018, she appeared in and contributed to Edutopia’s How Learning Happens series; as of today, the videos in the series have been viewed more than 11 million times.
Dr. Cantor received an M.D. from Cornell University Medical College and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Cantor was awarded the 2014 Purpose Prize for Intergenerational Impact.