Staff Profiles

Mary E. Curtis, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Special Education
Professor, School of Education

617-349-8577
mcurtis@lesley.edu

Mary E. Curtis is Professor of Education and founding director of the Center for Special Education at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Before coming to Lesley in 1999, she directed the Boys Town Reading Center, where she oversaw research and development on Reading Is FAME®, a remedial reading curriculum shown to reverse reading failure in older adolescents.

Mary Beth is the lead author of the Tool Kit for the Student Achievement in Reading (STAR) project, a professional development initiative of the US Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education. Currently she oversees program evaluation and certification activities for the National STAR Training Network.

Mary Beth is the author of numerous articles on reading diagnosis and remediation, the role of vocabulary in comprehension, and the reading skills of at-risk teens and adults. She is a member of the Adult Literacy Research Working Group, and was Lesley's Principal Investigator on a research project for improving the instruction of adult basic education intermediate readers, conducted in collaboration with Harvard University and Soliloquy Learning and funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education.

Mary Beth has been an advisor to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the National Institute for Literacy, the National Center for Family Literacy, the Alliance for Excellent Education, and the Massachusetts Department of Education. She is also a member of the Editorial Review Board for Reading Research Quarterly.

Mary Beth earned her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, and she has been an Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University, Associate Director of the Harvard Reading Laboratory, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Learning Research and Development Center (Pittsburgh, PA).

Karen Zimbrich, M.Ed.

Associate Director, Center for Special Education

617-349-8392

zimbrich@lesley.edu

Karen Zimbrich has over 35 years of experience as a special educator, inclusion specialist, and university instructor working to include and support students with significant intellectual disabilities in inclusive school and community settings. For the past two years, she has been Associate Director of the Center for Special Education, School of Education, at Lesley University. Current projects include a collaborative partnership for teacher education with two independent schools in greater Boston and the provision of professional development for K-12 special educators, general educators, and community-based organizations. Prior to coming to Lesley, Karen worked as a transition/education specialist for the Institute for Community Inclusion (a University Center of Excellence in Development Disabilities), affiliated with the University of Massachusetts at Boston. While there, she supervised state and federal programs in various urban high schools across the Commonwealth. Projects focused on inclusive K-14 education and school-to-adult transition for youth with significant disabilities.

Karen earned her M.Ed. in Deaf/Blind/Multiple Disabilities from Boston College and a B.S in Behavioral Disabilities from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.