Melina Uncapher

Founder & Scientific Director

Melina Uncapher is the Founder & Scientific Director of the EF+Math Program. She is an Assistant Professor and Director of Education at the University of California San Francisco’s Neuroscape center. Uncapher partners with educators to create approaches to problems of practice using rigorous science-of-learning insights and the wisdom of educators. She has also taught her Science of Learning teacher training course to tens of thousands of educators around the world to equip in-service educators with research-based principles about how students learn. Her deep interactions with and learnings from educators have instilled a practice-based lens to her ongoing research. She led a multi-university network funded by the National Science Foundation to study how executive function contributes to academic achievement in real-world classrooms (Project iLEAD) and co-founded a science-for-good nonprofit that equips educators and students with practical tools based on learning science (the Institute for Applied Neuroscience). She also ran a research program funded by the National Institutes for Health that investigates whether and how technology use is associated with developmental changes in student cognition and behavior. Uncapher is affiliated with Stanford’s Psychology department and is a MacArthur Scholar. She earned her undergraduate and PhD degrees in Neurobiology from the University of California, Irvine and completed postdoctoral and research scientist fellowships at Stanford University.