Dr. Marion Blank

Dr. Blank is the director of the A Light on Literacy Program in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University. She is a developmental psychologist with a specialization in language (both spoken and written) and learning. She has also worked extensively overseas and has served as a consultant to government bureaus in England, Canada, Holland, Israel and Australia.

Dr. Blank has spent over forty years studying how children learn to. She has lectured extensively around the world, authored over sixty articles and six books on language. Her latest book The Reading Remedy and her new software program www.readingkingdom.com makes her system available to every parent and educator.

In 2010, Dr. Blank was a recipient of the Upton Sinclair Award in Education. In 1994 and 1995, she was selected as the New Jersey nominee for the Frank R. Kleffner Clinical Career Award of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. In 1990, she developed a software reading program, Sentence Master, which received the Special Education Software Award of 1990 from the Software Publishers Association and a Certificate of Achievement in the Johns Hopkins University National Search. In 1991,
she co-authored a book, A Parent's Guide to Educational Software (Microsoft Press, 1991) that reviewed over 200 software programs parents may use at home to foster their children's education. Her books Directing School Discourse (1994) and Directing Early Discourse (1995) provide unique methods for fostering language skills in children who are experiencing school difficulties. She is also the principal author of the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (PLAI), a test published in both in English and Spanish, that is designed to assess the verbal communication skills of children in the preschool years.

From 1973 to 1983, she was a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School. In that capacity, she served as the director of a research unit in reading disabilities. From 1960 to 1973, she was on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Her work there included serving as the Director of the teaching program of the Interdisciplinary
Training Program, participating in a research unit on human behavioral development (with a focus on poverty and handicapped populations) and service on the Women's Rights Committee.

Dr. Blank received a PhD in psychology from Cambridge University in England, a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University and an MS in education and a BA from City College in New York. She is licensed as a psychologist in New York and New Jersey.