Pamela Cantor, M.D.

Founder and Senior Science Advisor, Turnaround for Children

Pamela Cantor, M.D. practiced child and adolescent psychiatry for nearly two decades, specializing in trauma. She founded Turnaround for Children in 2002, after co-authoring a study on the impact of the 9/11 attacks on NYC schoolchildren. She recognized that the research on stress and the developing brain she studied in medical school needed to be shared and translated for the systems that educate children. Today, Turnaround translates scientific knowledge about how children develop and learn into tools, resources and services that establish the conditions and practices all students need to thrive.

Dr. Cantor is a founding leader of the Science of Learning and Development Alliance, a collaborative effort focused on elevating science, advancing equity, and transforming education. In 2018, Applied Developmental Science published two papers co-authored by Dr. Cantor, “Malleability, Plasticity, and Individuality: How Children Learn and Develop in Context” and “Drivers of Human Development: How Relationships and Context Shape Learning and Development.” She has been a featured speaker at events including the iNACOL (Aurora Institute) Symposium, ASU + GSV Summit, and Education Writers Association National Seminar. Her work has been highlighted in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. In 2018, she appeared in and contributed to Edutopia’s How Learning Happens series.

Dr. Cantor received an M.D. from Cornell University Medical College and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.