Meet the Speakers

Topic: “Creative Problem-Solving in Challenging Environments”

Keynoters 

Michael D. Mumford, PhD

Michael D. Mumford received his doctoral degree from the University of Georgia in 1983 in the fields of industrial and organizational psychology and psychometrics. At the University of Oklahoma he has served as the George Lynn Cross Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Applied Social Research. Over the course of his career, he has published more than 450, peer reviewed, articles (H > 110) on creativity, leadership, planning and ethics. 

Dr. Mumford has published fourteen books on topics such as the leadership of creative efforts in organizations, organizational creativity, organizational planning and eminent or outstanding leadership. He has received over $30 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Labor, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the United States Intelligence Community and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. His work on these projects has, for example, resulted in the development of the United States current system for describing jobs (O*NET), revision of the United States military’s system for officer assessment and career development and formulation of new prototype systems for appraisal and development of professional ethics.

Dr. Mumford is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 3, 5, 10, 14 ) the American Psychological Society and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He has served as senior editor of two major academic publications, The Leadership Quarterly and The Creativity Research Journal, and sat on numerous editorial boards including those of The Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, The Journal of Creative Behavior, Group and Organization Management and Ethics and Behavior – among other publications.  He is a recipient of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace, the Academy of Management’s Eminent Leadership Scholar Award for lifetime contributions to the study of organizational leadership and the American Psychological Association’s Arnheim Award for lifetime contributions to the study of creativity and innovation.

Dr. Mumford has served as President of the Society for Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. He has supervised more than eighty doctoral students who have obtained employment at leading academic institutions (Penn State, Wash U), government organizations (FAA, US Army) and industrial firms (IBM, Amazon). Dr. Mumford routinely instructs senior R&D executives from firms, such as Volvo and Dupont, on effective management of creative efforts in organizations.

Ruth Richards, MD, PhD

Ruth Richards, MD, PhD, educational psychologist, Board Certified psychiatrist, and professor for almost 25 years at Saybrook University in Creativity Studies, and Consciousness, Spirituality, and Integrative Health, is a Fellow with the American Psychological Association (APA) in Divs. 10, 32, and 48, and a member of Div. 34. She has published numerous articles, edited/written four books on everyday creativity, and received the Rudolf Arnheim Award from Div. 10 APA for Outstanding Lifetime Accomplishment in Psychology and the Arts.

Dr. Richards’ 2018 Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 hardbound, 2019 paperback) won a Silver Nautilus Award (“Better Books for a Better World”). A forthcoming coedited book with David Schuldberg, and Shan Guisinger, features some remarkable contributors, and brings a transformative vision to social scientists in our profoundly interconnected and complex world. The intent is to reawaken awareness of the complexity, interdependence, and multilayered complex adaptive systems of life and of the realms of consciousness we inhabit, along with a new awe, humility, and wonder. Due out in 2020-2021 from Oxford University Press, Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology: Keys to Creativity in Mind and Life, introduces to mainstream linear social sciences, a new worldview. Moving beyond that, it also can affect how each of us live and see our lives—a new view of self-in-world.

Dr. Richards’ work spans education, clinical areas, social action, spirituality, aesthetics and awareness, and the importance of chaos and complexity theories in areas including our dynamic identity, interconnection, mutual awareness, expanded empathy, and forward potentials for evolution in a challenged world, and evolving cosmos. Earlier, Dr. Richards was Principal Investigator at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, working with Dennis Kinney and others, on development and validation of the Lifetime Creativity Scales. These were written up by Daniel Goleman in The New York Times, while highlighting new findings on risk for bipolar disorder and an everyday creative “compensatory advantage” among better functioning relatives. The message is mainly about health.

She advocates, now as then, for a “new normal,” broader, more diverse, more exploratory and process-oriented, more open to experience and beyond ego, while helping free us all to embrace risk-taking, discovery, and living beyond fixed expectations, toward our higher humanistic, and human, potential. Aspects of this pattern are already seen, in part, in self-actualizing individuals in humanistic psychology. There is also implication for a more integrated self, broader awareness of the world, and living toward a larger good. Dr. Richards thus sees dynamic creative living as central to advancement of individuals and cultures, both separately and together, and to emergence of a new worldview and view of self-in-world.

Jonathan Plucker, PhD

Prof. Jonathan Plucker is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, where he also serves at the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs. Previously, he served as the Julian C. Stanley Endowed Professor of Talent Development at Johns Hopkins, Raymond Neag Endowed Professor of Education at the University of Connecticut, and Professor of Educational Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He received his Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Virginia. His research examines creativity, talent development, and education policy, and his books include Creativity and Innovation, Excellence Gaps in Education with Scott Peters, and Essentials of Creativity Assessment with James Kaufman and John Baer. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award and E. Paul Torrance Creativity Award from the National Association for Gifted Children. He is a past-president of the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and of the National Association for Gifted Children.

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.” 

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.

Gerard J. Puccio, PhD

Gerard J. Puccio is a State University of New York – Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Creativity and Change Leadership Department at SUNY-Buffalo State, New York, USA.

Dr. Puccio has written more than 60 articles, chapters, and books. His most recent book, titled Organizational Creativity and Innovation: A Personal Journey for Innovators and Entrepreneurs, highlights the crucial role creativity plays in an economy driven by innovation. Prior to this publication, Dr. Puccio co-authored The Innovative Team (co-author C. Grivas), published by Jossey-Bass, a fable about a team that was able to apply proven creative-thinking tools to turn around a dysfunctional and unproductive situation.

Dr. Puccio is an accomplished speaker and consultant; he has worked with major corporations, universities, and numerous school districts. Some of his recent clients include the Crayola, BBC, Fisher-Price Brands, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, The Smithsonian Institution, BNP Paribas, Rubbermaid, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. He has delivered creativity workshops and presentations across the United States and in more than 20 different countries.

Gerard holds a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Manchester, England.

5th Kaufman Family Research Symposium

Topic: “Innovations in Intelligence Assessment Methods”

Keynoter to follow

Reisman Diagnostic Creativity Assessment Special Interest Group – RDCA SIG

Topic: “The role of the RDCA and RDMA to foster creativity awareness and creative development in education and corporate environments.”

SIG Panellists

Craig Bach, PhD

Craig Bach is an associate research professor at Drexel University in the School of Education and Director of Evaluation for the Freddie Reisman Center for Translational Research in Creativity and Motivation and the Education Passport. An expert in learning assessment and analytics, accreditation, program evaluation, and instructional technologies, Craig is an education leader with demonstrated success developing impactful and relevant education products and services across a broad range of educational types and settings, including early learning, K-12 and post-secondary settings as well as programs in for-profit, public and private institutions. Craig has focused his efforts on developing sustainable, data-informed, value-add approaches to challenges facing institutions in response to demographic and market shifts and the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Prior to his current role, Craig was Goddard Systems Inc.’s vice president of education, where he led the educational programming and training for Goddard Schools. He also served as Drexel University’s vice provost for institutional research, assessment, and effectiveness, and as vice president of the Office of Institutional Effectiveness at Kaplan Higher Education. Craig holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in mathematics and philosophy, and a master’s degree in mathematics and a doctorate in logic and the methodology of science from the University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as a member of The Goddard School’s Educational Advisory Board, a team of acknowledged experts in various fields of early childhood education.

Mitch Marcello is the founder and director of Imago Design and Innovation Firm. Driven by the belief that a complex world needs innovative solutions, Mitch is passionate about assisting leaders, teams, and organizations to understand and realize their creative potential. With a wide portfolio of innovation work, Mitch has assisted communities, colleges, architecture firms, law firms, and more to build workplaces where innovation occurs consistently. As an international speaker, Mitch challenges audiences to merge both science and art while contemplating the area of innovation. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master of Science in Creativity and Innovation from Drexel University, and is the recipient of the Fredricka K. Reisman award in Creativity and Innovation.

Mariette Fourie, EdD

Mariette Fourie holds a doctorate degree in Educational Psychology, with well-established knowledge, experience, and expertise in mixed method research design (extensive quantitative research), is the Quality Manager: Academic Programmes, and a proud affiliated member of the Optentia research unit at the North-West University (NWU) in South Africa. Mariette is rendering support and professional statistical analysis to postgraduate students and academics, as well as national and international studies. She retains more than 20 years’ experience in education. Mariette is an international facilitator for the Online Learning Consortium, offering online professional development workshops pertaining to Neuro, Cognitive and Learning Sciences, as well as the Instructional Designer Certificate Program. She is further an affiliated researcher of the Education, Learning and Brain Sciences (E-LaBS) in the School of Education, Drexel University. Mariette was appointed as subject matter expert for Drexel University in Mind, Brain and Education sciences and the Learning Sciences during 2020 and 2021 and developed various course content in the Higher Education Leadership Program. She has also presented numerous professional development workshops for faculty on teaching, learning, and assessment nationally and internationally. Mariette’s expertise further includes Higher Education (HE) Research and Development, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) of faculty.

Her EdD study developed the MEIPAC (Model to engender information processing ability in the classroom) and included the theoretical frameworks of Positive Psychology, Cognition, and Educational Neuroscience. She has investigated the role of various learning theories (the theory of the mind, psychosocial, cognitive, socio-constructivist, social cognitive, and metacognitive), as influenced by these theoretical frameworks, in how learners learn best. As part of her master’s degree in Educational Psychology, Mariette developed the SELOC (Teacher Efficacy and Locus of Control Scale). The findings of her study contributed to the professional development of teachers to better prepare them and to maintain a supportive setting in which they can grow professionally and contribute to student achievement and academic success. Mariette obtained a postgraduate diploma in higher education with specialization in academic development focusing on enabling disruptive spaces towards facilitating the epistemological discourse towards transformation and social justice in higher education. These disruptive spaces are facilitated from ideology to engaged scholarship and pedagogic responsiveness in knowing, becoming, and being—a reflexive praxis approach. This qualification was further underpinned by a critical and social realist approach. 

Mariette’s immersed research interest enables her to further contribute to the interrelated and interdisciplinary fields of educational neuroscience, educational psychology, and neuropsychology. Mariette’s research is further inspired by the epistemic becoming of students in higher education (HE) with an emphasis on epistemic justice and quality in HE. Mariette regard herself as a critical realist, mapping the ontological character of social reality. Her professional character further portrays a strong disposition towards social justice and transformation in HE. Her current research focuses on the provision of epistemological access in HE disciplines focusing on epistemic cognition and assessment. In classrooms where teachers explicitly focus on the arguments and justifications for ideas in their discipline (i.e., emphasising not just the what but also the why and how of learning), students are more likely to engage in effective epistemic cognition. The overall quality in HE is a prerequisite to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and the competencies that they need to be successful after graduation. Within the ambit of fitness for purpose and transformation, quality is defined as achieving impact in teaching, learning and assessment (TLA) within an overarching fitness of purpose framework as it refers to knowledge creation focusing on epistemic justice and the provision of epistemological access in higher education.

FRC* Transactional Research Lecture Series

Topic: “Cultivating Creativity in Educational Settings: Strategies for educators to foster creativity and motivation in students across different disciplines”

Bonnie Cramond, PhD  

Dr Bonnie Cramond, Ph.D. Bonnie is Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology and Gifted and Creative Education at the University of Georgia, USA. She was a former Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development. She has published numerous articles, chapters, and a book (another is in the works). A national and international speaker, she has visited over 35 countries working toward infusing creativity into classrooms at all levels. She was honored in 2011 to be invited to give a TEDx Talk on creativity and has gratefully received other international and national honors. Dr Cramond is on the FRC Advisory Board.

*Drexel University Freddie Reisman Center For Transactional Research in Creativity and Motivation.

7th Global Comparative and International Education Forum (Global CIE Forum) Roundtable

Topic: “Cultural Diversity and Inclusion in Education”

Liz Jackson, PhD

Liz Jackson is Professor and Assistant Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. She is President of the Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong, a Fellow and Past President of PESA, and the former Director of the Comparative Education Research Centre. Her research interests include global studies, philosophy of education, and comparative views of philosophy and moral psychology. Her publications include Muslims and Islam in US Education: Reconsidering Multiculturalism, Questioning Allegiance: Resituating Civic Education, Beyond Virtue: The Politics of Educating Emotions, and Contesting Education and Identity in Hong Kong. 

12th Big Data Analytics & Digital Enterprise Symposium  

Topic: “Big data analytics & Digital enterprise”

Dominique Heger, PhD

Dominique Heger has over 30 years of data science and predictive analytics experience. He specializes in quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), focusing on robotics and deep learning related projects. He is the owner and co-founder of DHTechnologies, an IT AI/ML consulting firm, and QuMatrix (formerly Data Analytica),  specialising in classical and quantum computing. The two companies are headquartered in Texas.

Dr Heger has successfully conducted large-scale AI/ML, robotics, quantum computing, and big data projects for companies such as Boeing, AT&T, LLNL, NERSC, Oak Ridge, Dell, QLogic, Wells Fargo, EBay, EOG Research, Google, Nvidia, ESPN, BHP, Oceaneering or CERN. Prior to being self-employed, Dominique worked for IBM, Hewlett-Packard (4 years at CERN in Geneva), and Unisys. Over the years, he has published over 40 papers and books with IEEE, CMG, or the IBM Press. Dr Heger holds an MBA/MIS from Maryville University St. Louis, and a Ph.D. in Information Systems from NSU, Florida. Next to his work in mathematics and data science, he very much enjoys spending time with his family, training horses in the Texas Hill Country, and the cowboy sport of team roping