Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Chair of Harvard Project Zero's Steering Committee. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in education. He has been awarded eighteen honorary degrees--including degrees from Princeton University, McGill University and Tel Aviv University on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the state of Israel. The John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded him a Fellowship for 2000.

The author of nineteen books translated into twenty-one languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past fifteen years, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments, education for understanding, and the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Most recently, Gardner has been carrying out intensive case studies of exemplary creators and leaders; he and colleagues have launched an investigation of the relationship between cutting-edge work in different domains and a sense of social responsibility for the use and implications of that work. Gardner's two most recent books, both now available in paperback, are The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Penguin Books, 2000) and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (Basic Books, 1999). In September 2001, Basic Books will publish Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, the first book to issue from Gardner and colleagues' current research study.