Cindy Hmelo-Silver earned her B.S. in cardiorespiratory sciences and M.S. in educational computing from SUNY Stony Brook and her M.S. and Ph.D. in educational technology from Vanderbilt University. She held previous appointments at Georgia Tech, the University of Pittsburgh, and Rutgers University. In 2014, she joined the IU Bloomington School of Education as Professor of Learning Sciences, and since 2015, she has held the Barbara B. Jacobs Chair in Education and Technology.
Bridging K-12 and higher education communities, her scholarship has provided a blueprint for implementing problem-based learning strategies in a variety of instructional settings with application across all disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities. Hmelo-Silver’s research has transformed three research fields: science learning and technology, problem-based learning (PBL), and learning sciences and computer-supported collaborative learning. The most prominent, productive, and well-known scholar in her field, Hmelo-Silver’s work on complex systems learning, facilitation techniques, and collaborative computer-supported learning anticipated by nearly 20 year of fields of machine learning and learning analytics.
Cindy Hmelo-Silver has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications, 10 edited books, and more than 45 book chapters. Her work has been cited over 21,000 times (h-index=56), with over 10,000 citations in the last five years. Since 2014, Hmelo-Silver has received $9.4 million as PI or co-PI, which represents nearly 20 percent of the total amount of external funding secured by the entire IU Bloomington School of Education from 2015-2020. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Educational Sciences. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Psychologist, and the Journal of the Learning Sciences and she is an elected fellow of the American Education Research Association, an inaugural fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, and fellow of the International Society for Design and Development in Education. She has given invited talks in China, Israel, South Africa, Germany, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong, Qatar, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, France, Ireland, Brazil, South Korea, Finland, United Kingdom, and throughout the United States.
