Dr. Maryanne Wolf
Maryanne Wolf is a cognitive neuroscientist and child development scholar who studies how the brain learns to read. She is a distinguished fellow and visiting professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, where she directs the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice, and she previously founded the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.
Wolf’s central insight is that humans are not born to read: the brain must build a “reading circuit” for each child, which is why so many struggle without the right instruction. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), she explained this science for a general audience, laying the groundwork for evidence-based approaches to early reading, dyslexia, and decoding. In Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (2016), she widened the lens to the global challenge of literacy access, an interest she has pursued through her work with the nonprofit Curious Learning, which brings literacy tools to children without schools. In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018), she turned to a newer threat, warning that screen-driven skimming may erode the deep reading, critical analysis, and empathy that literacy is meant to build.
Together, her work frames the literacy crisis as both a failure to teach children how to read and a risk that even skilled readers will lose the capacity for sustained, thoughtful reading. That has made her a leading voice for educators, parents, and policymakers seeking solutions grounded in how the brain actually learns.
