Art Graesser, Ph.D.

Professor
Department of Psychology and the Institute for Intelligent System

The University of Memphis
Psychology Department
202 Psychology Building
Memphis, TN 38152-3230

Phone: 901-678-4857
Fax: 901-678-2579
Email: graesser@memphis.edu

Dr. Art Grasser was a Co-Principal Investigator of CSAL. He is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute of Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis and he is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego. His primary research interests are in cognitive science, discourse processing, and the learning sciences. More specific interests include knowledge representation, question asking and answering, tutoring, text comprehension, inference generation, conversation, reading, education, memory, emotions, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and learning technologies with animated conversational agents. He served as editor of the journal Discourse Processes (1996–2005) and Journal of Educational Psychology (2009-2014) and as presidents of the Empirical Studies of Literature, Art, and Media (1989-1992), the Society for Text and Discourse (2007-2010), International Society for Artificial Intelligence in Education (2007-2009), and the FABBS Foundation (2012-13).  He has published over 500 articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings. He is currently serving as Chair of the Framework group in PISA Collaborative Problem Solving 2015. Dr. Graesser and his colleagues have designed, developed, and tested software that integrates psychological sciences with learning, language, and discourse technologies, including AutoTutor, AutoTutor-Lite, MetaTutor, GuruTutor, DeepTutor, HURA Advisor, SEEK Web Tutor, Operation ARIES!, iSTART, Writing-Pal, AutoCommunicator, Point & Query, Question Understanding Aid (QUAID), QUEST, & Coh-Metrix. Graesser received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (Society for Text and Discourse, 2010), the Distinguished Contributions of Applications of Psychology to Education and Training Award (American Psychological Association, 2011), and the first Presidential Award for Lifetime Achievement in Research from the University of Memphis. He is expected to contribute to the CSAL project in the development of advanced computer technologies that aid adult readers in comprehending text at deeper levels.