Heidi Silver-Pacuilla

Heidi Silver-Pacuilla, Ph.D., senior research analyst, is the deputy director of NCTI funded by the Office of Special Education Programs. She and NCTI director, Tracy Gray, are co-editors of the forthcoming book, Breakthrough Learning through Inclusive Technology from Springer Publishing. She is also a task leader on a technical assistance project to provide guidance to adult education practitioners to improve their writing instruction. Her research and technical assistance work has focused on applying best practice research from the special education literature to digital environments for students of all ages with disabilities. She has delivered many presentations and published several articles and chapters on teaching youth and adults with disabilities, particularly those who struggle with literacy. At AIR, she has also been involved in developing and teaching a distance learning course on accommodating adults with disabilities for adult educators for CalPro (www.calpro-online.org) and developing an online warehouse of adult education standards. Prior to working at AIR, she was the recipient of a Mary Switzer Fellowship from the National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research to study the introduction of assistive technology into adult education programming for adults with learning disabilities. She serves on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Literacy.