Cathy N. Davidson is an educational innovator and a distinguished scholar of the history of technology, is a champion of active ways of learning that help students to understand and navigate the radically changed world in which we now all live, work, and learn. The 2016 recipient of the Ernest J. Boyer Award for Significant Contributions to Higher Education, she champions new ideas and methods for learning and professional development–in school, in the workplace, and in everyday life. In January 2019, Davidson will speak about The New Education at the Nobel Prize Dialogue on the Future of Learning with eminent international educators at the Dialogue Congreso Futuro in Santiago, Chile.

Davidson was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities by President Obama (2011-2017) and served on the Board of Directors of Mozilla (2012-2018). A frequent speaker and consultant on institutional change at universities, non-profits, corporations, and other organizations, Davidson writes for the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Times Higher Ed, as well as many other academic and trade publications in the U.S. and abroad. She has published some twenty books on technology, the history of the book, literature, education, and cognitive neuroscience, including Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America; Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, with documentary photographer Bill Bamberger; The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, with David Theo Goldberg; and Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

Her most recent book, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Basic Books 2017) is the 2019 recipient of the Frederic W. Ness Book Prize from the Association of American Colleges and Universities.