11th Annual E. Paul Torrance International Roundtable on Creative Thinking
Topic: “Torrance at 110: The Future of Creative Thinking in a Complex World”
Fredricka Reisman, PhD
Fredricka Reisman, Ph.D., Emerita Professor, is founder of the Drexel University School of Education and is Director of the Freddie Reisman Center for Translational Research in Creativity and Motivation (FRC) created in 2022 with a $1.5million dollar gift to Drexel by a major doner. She also serves as Co-Director of the Drexel/Torrance Center for Creativity and Innovation while continuing to teach in Drexel’s Creativity & Innovation programs that she founded and to serve on dissertation committees for doctoral students interested in the Creativity & Innovation concentration.
Dr. Reisman received her PhD in Mathematics Education from Syracuse University. She was a 3 and 5 grade, middle school and high school mathematics teacher in New York State and a mathematics education instructor at Syracuse University (SU) where she also was the Diagnostic Mathematics Clinician in the SU Arithmetic Studies Center which at that time was the first in the nation. Prior to Drexel, Dr. Reisman served as Professor and Chair of the Division of Elementary Education at the University of Georgia where for 12 years she worked closely, engaged in research and published with Dr. E. Paul Torrance, known world-wide as the “Father of Creativity”.
Dr. Reisman has been awarded over $14,800,000 in private and government grants to support her research and teacher education projects. She has served as an evaluator on funded engineering projects and numerous Pennsylvania and New York State university teacher certification programs. Dr. Reisman has created several books, contributions to books, journal publications, and assessments that focus on mathematics learning and teaching in addition to creativity applications including the co-created Reisman Diagnostic Creativity Assessment (RDCA) and the Reisman Diagnostic Motivation Assessment (RDMA) and a 2021 co-authored book published by Routledge entitled Using Creativity to Address Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Dyscalculia: Assessment and Techniques. She has served since 2013 and continues as the editor for the Knowledge, Innovation & Enterprise (KIE) conference books. She is co-author of a Cambridge University Press 2024 book entitled “Connecting Creativity and Motivation Research to Classroom Experience: Lab to Learner”.
Dr. Reisman was awarded the 2001 New Millennium Foundation Technology Award, the national 2002 Champion of Creativity Award by the American Creativity Association (ACA), and the 2017 National Association for Gifted Children E. Paul Torrance Award. Drexel University honored her in the Spring of 2020, where the university-wide faculty creativity award was renamed the “Freddie Reisman Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity Awards.”
Pamela Burnard, PhD
Pamela Burnard is an Australian Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK. She is presently in the middle of her third phased career. The first phase saw her working as a professional musician in the Creative Industries. The second phase involved working across Early Years, Primary and Secondary sectors as a music educator. In her third phase, she has kept herself very busy publishing widely with 25 books and over 120 articles which advance the theory and practice of pluralising creativities across education and industry sectors including early years, primary, secondary, further and higher/further education, through to creative and cultural industries. Current funded projects include ‘Choices, Chances and Transitions around Creative Further and Higher Education’ (funded by The Nuffield Trust). Three of her most recent books include: Eruptive Research: Changing Landscapes on Research in Teaching and Learning (Brill-i-Sense, 2025); Music for Inclusion and Healing in Schools and Beyond: Hip Hop, Techno, Grime and More? (Oxford University Press, 2023); and The Routledge Companion to Creativities in Music Education. (Routledge, 2023). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), the Chartered College of Teaching (CCT) in the UK, Professor-in-Residence and Governor at the University of Cambridge Primary School and newly appointed Co-Editor of Music Education Research. [see a) Pam’s full profile, b) Researchgate, c) University of Cambridge Arts, Sciences & Creativities Research Group.
KH Kim, PhD
Kyung-Hee Kim (Kay Kim) is professor of creativity and innovation at College of William & Mary School of Education, Virginia, USA. Kay is an inventor, with two bio-medical technology US patents, and best-selling author, including The Creativity Challenge (USA, 2016), Education for the Future (Korea, 2019) and Let Them Play Outside the Box (Korea, 2019). She believes everyone can become an innovator using creative thinking skills. Her humble origin on a farm in Korea proves it. Her life’s work promotes creative thinking skills of mastery, imagination, and critical thinking as antidotes to creativity-killing social conformity and test-centric rigidity. She began that work studying under the father of creativity, E. Paul Torrance. Kay won the Berlyne Award (2009) from the American Psychological Association, and the Hollingworth Award (2008), the Early Scholar Award (2011), and the Torrance Award (2018) from the National Association for Gifted Children, becoming one of the foremost experts on creativity assessment and innovation. Her Creativity Quotient assessment uses her eye-tracking patent. Media and government leaders frequently seek her expertise through interviews and speaking engagements. It is her passion to promote entrepreneurship through the creative thinking methodologies of her life’s work.
Bill Lucas, PhD
Professor Bill Lucas is Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester, UK. He is a writer, speaker and education reformer. Bill’s research focuses on understanding those dispositions for learning which help people succeed and flourish in life, how they can be cultivated and how evidenced. Bill’s model of creativity, developed with colleagues at the University of Winchester, is now in use in more than thirty countries.
Bill is chair of the advisory board of the Global Institute of Creative Thinking and is a Commissioner for the UK’s Digital Badging Commission. He was co-chair of the strategic advisory group for the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking Test and an academic adviser to the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education and to the OECD’s recent research into creativity and critical thinking. In 2020, Bill co-founded Rethinking Assessment and in the same year was honoured with a special edition focusing on his work in reforming assessment by the British Psychological Society.
Bill’s recent publications include Creative thinking in schools across the world: a snapshot of progress in 2022 and A field guide to assessing creative thinking in schools. His acclaimed critique of the education system, Educating Ruby: what our children really need to learn, written with Guy Claxton, asks challenging questions about the future of education. Bill’s latest publication is Creative Thinking in Schools: a Leadership playbook. It has been translated into Welsh, Thai and Urdu.
Punya Mishra, PhD
Punya Mishra, Professor & Director of Innovative Learning Futures at the Learning Engineering Institute and Professor at the Mary Lou Fulton College of Teaching & Learning Innovation at Arizona State University. He also has an affiliate appointment in ASU’s Design School. As director, he provides strategic vision around research, program development, and public engagement to the institute. Prior to this he served as associate dean of Scholarship & Innovation, leading multiple initiatives, on developing a future-forward, equity-driven, collaborative approach to educational research. He is internationally recognized for his work in educational technology; the role of creativity and aesthetics in learning; and the application of design to educational innovation. He has received over $11 million in grants; published over 200 articles and edited 5 books. A recipient of AECT’s David H. Jonassen Excellence in Research Award, with over 67,000 citations of his research, he is ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide (ranked #91 in social science) and the #62 (#11 in psychology) amongst scholars with the biggest influence on educational practice and policy. An AERA Fellow and TED-Ed educator, he co-hosts the award-winning Silver Lining for Learning and the Learning Futures podcasts. He is an award-winning instructor, having taught courses, at all levels in educational technology, educational psychology, design, and creativity. He is also an engaging public-speaker and an accomplished visual artist. (See also Punya’s personal homepage.)
Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson is Head of Quality Enhancement at Aston University in the UK. With nearly 30 years of experience in higher education, Chris brings a multidisciplinary background spanning music, the arts, and engineering. His research focuses on creativity and education, informed by longstanding engagement in supporting new educators and advancing the professional recognition of senior academic leaders, and he is an active member of the Advisory Board of the Freddie Reisman Center for Translational Research in Creativity and Motivation. A Principal Fellow of Advance HE, Chris has led and supported professional development initiatives internationally, including in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Greece, and Oman.Angus Fletcher, PhD
Angus Fletcher (PhD, Yale) is Professor of Story Science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. His research into narrative cognition has been funded by institutes such as the National Science Foundation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His recent books include Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Story (Simon and Schuster, 2021), Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence (Columbia University Press, 2023), Narrative Creativity: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Primal Intelligence (Penguin Random House, 2025). He has been honored with the Torrance Lecture at the University of Georgia and with the US Army Commendation Medal for his “groundbreaking research” with US Special Operations into creative thinking.
6th Kaufman Family Research Symposium
Dual Session Part 1: Intelligence and Creativity: From Historical Foundations to Digital Futures
Keynoters
Neil Maiden,PhD
Neil Maiden is Professor of Digital Creativity at the Bayes Business School at City St George’s, University of London and Director of its Institute for Creativity and AI. His research interests include uses of artificial intelligence to augment human creativity. He is and has been a principal and co-investigator on numerous UK EPSRC- and EU-funded research projects with a total value of over £64 million. He has published over 220 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals and conferences. He chaired the Steering Committee for the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering series 2009-2012, and was Editor of the IEEE Software’s Requirements column 2005-2013. His details are available here.
Part 2: Special Panel Presentation: Ongoing Research Projects in Creativity
James C. Kaufman, PhD
James C. Kaufmanis a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 50 books, including Creativity 101 (2nd Edition, 2016) and the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (2nd Edition, 2019; with Robert Sternberg). He has published more than 300 papers, including the study that spawned the “Sylvia Plath Effect,” and three well-known theories of creativity, including (with Ron Beghetto) the Four-C Model of Creativity. He is a past president of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association. James has won many awards, including Mensa’s research award, the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and APA’s Berlyne and Farnsworth awards. He co-founded two major journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture). He has tested Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s creativity on CNN, appeared in the hit Australia show Redesign Your Brain, and narrated the comic book documentary Independents. He wrote the book and lyrics to Discovering Magenta, which had its NYC premiere in 2015. More here.
Sarah Luria, PhD
Dr. Sarah Luria is a former public-school teacher of mathematics and human rights. This Fall, she joins the University at Albany as an Assistant Professor of Education. Her accomplishments include a M.Ed. in Special Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, as well as advanced certificates in Human Rights and Gifted Education. Her teaching expertise centers around culturally and historically responsive pedagogy and social justice in education. In her research, Sarah explores the relationships between creativity and equity-orientation (which broadly includes prejudice, tolerance, empathy, and perspective-taking abilities). More recently, she has begun investigations into the ways that the politics of respectability affect teachers’ interpretations of student dissent and the potential of democratic classroom practice (specifically creativity boosting strategies; e.g., debate and perspective-taking) to support student autonomy. She has won awards including the P.E.O Scholarship, the Gerberich Fellowship Fund Award, and the Gavin Dissertation Award.
Jennifer Drake, PhD
Jennifer Drake is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research program focuses on the psychology of the visual arts. In one line of research, she examines the affective benefits of engaging in the visual arts for children and adults. In a second line of research, she studies the cognitive and perceptual skills underlying drawing ability in artistically gifted children and adult artists. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Imagination Institute supported by the John Templeton Foundation, and PSC-CUNY. Her research has been featured in Scientific American Mind, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, The New York Times, and on CBS News Sunday Morning and National Public Radio. She is a Fellow of the Society for Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts of the American Psychological Association.