Curatorial and Senior Education Staff
Dr. Margaret Honey, president and CEO, joined the New York Hall of Science in November of 2008. She is widely recognized for her work using digital technologies to support children’s learning across the disciplines of science, mathematics, engineering and technology. Prior to joining NYSCI, she served as a vice president of the Education Development Center and director of EDC’s Center for Children and Technology.
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While at EDC, Dr. Honey was the architect and overseer of numerous large-scale projects funded by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Education Sciences, The Carnegie Corporation, The Library of Congress, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Energy. She also co-directed the Northeast and Islands Regional Education Laboratory, a 40 million dollar federally-funded initiative designed to help educators, policy makers and communities improve schools by helping them access and leverage the most current research about learning and K–12 education.
Dr. Honey has helped to shape the best thinking about learning and technology with special attention to traditionally underserved audiences. She has directed numerous research projects including efforts to identify teaching practices and assessments for 21st century skills, new approaches to teaching computational science in high schools, collaborations with PBS, CPB and some of the nation’s largest public television stations, investigations of data-driven decision-making tools and practices; and with colleagues at Bank Street College of Education, she created one of the first internet-based professional development programs in the country. From her early involvement in the award-winning and ground-breaking public television series “The Voyage of the Mimi” to her decade long collaboration on the education reform team for the Union City (New Jersey) school district, Margaret Honey has led some of the country’s most innovative and successful education efforts.
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Eric Siegel, director and chief content officer leads the education, program, exhibition development, science and technology functions at NYSCI. He led the planning and institutional fundraising for the $92 million expansion completed in 2004, as well as directing the development of 4 major exhibitions. He directed two recently completed exhibitions ShadowPLAY and Rocket Park Mini Golf, and is leading the development of two major exhibitions that will open in 2014.
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Siegel has been in senior roles in art and science museums for over 25 years and has published extensively in the museum field. As a consultant he has worked with They Might Be Giants, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the National Endowment for the Arts and many other organizations. He is President of the National Association for Museum Exhibitions; Board Member of SolarOne, an urban environmental organization in NYC; and past Chairman of the Museums Council of New York City. He is a lifelong musician who has composed music for network and cable television, and currently performs actively on guitar and piano.
Siegel graduated from the CORO Leadership New York program, and holds an MBA in arts administration from SUNY Binghamton. He teaches actively as a member of the graduate faculty of the New York University Museums Studies and Interactive Telecommunications programs.
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Robert Logan, executive vice president and chief operations officer, joined the New York Hall of Science in December 2004. His primary areas of responsibility include Visitor Services, Exhibit Maintenance, Facilities Management and Security. He gives oversight to Membership, Special Events and Facility Rentals.
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He gives oversight to Special Events and Facility Rentals. He is also responsible for the relationship management of the Hall's retail and food service outsource partners.
Prior to joining the Hall, he held positions in Visitor Services and Audience Development at the Dahesh Museum of Art and The New York Botanical Garden. Previously he served as Senior Manager for Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and Annual Events.
He received a M.A. from Northwestern University's School of Speech and an undergraduate degree in theater from San Francisco State University.
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Dr. David Kanter, director of SciPlay, joined NYSCI in September of 2010 as the inaugural director of the Sara Lee Schupf Family Center for Play, Science, and Technology Learning. He comes to NYSCI from Temple University where he was faculty in Curriculum, Instruction and Technology in Education and in Biology.
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His training began with Bachelor of Science degrees in Engineering and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Kanter then took a NSF fellowship designed to train Ph.D. scientists in science education research, which he pursued with the Learning Sciences group at Northwestern University.
As a faculty member at Northwestern University and then at Temple University, Kanter led several federally funded projects in the context of which he designed middle and high school biology project-based inquiry science curricula, tested these curricula in urban classrooms in Chicago and Philadelphia, and researched design principles for such curricula that promote students’ science learning.
Kanter also designed programs to train practicing and future teachers to help them learn to use projects and inquiry to teach science. These programs included the replication of the UTeach teacher preparation program as part of a national initiative.
Kanter researched teacher learning and how it translates into improvements in students’ achievement, attitudes, and career plans. Kanter’s work has most recently been published in the journals Science Education, the Journal of Engineering Education, and New Directions in Teaching and Learning.
Kanter’s classroom curricula continue to be used by teachers and students in Chicago and Philadelphia.
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Dr. Stephen Uzzo, vice president of science and technology, focuses on a number of projects related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning; sustainability and network science including Connections: the Nature of Networks, a public exhibition on network science that opened in 2004. He was also the local organizer for the 2007 International Conference and Workshop on Network Science.
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NYSCI, Dr. Uzzo serves on the faculty of the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) Graduate School of Education, where he teaches STEM teaching and learning.
During the 1980’s, he worked on a number of media and technology projects. In 1981, he was part of the launch team for MTV and was appointed Chief Engineer for Video/ Computer Graphics Production and Distance Learning Networks for the NYIT Video Center in 1984. Other projects during that period included the first all digital satellite television transmission, best practices group for NBC Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona, and a team of scientists and engineers at Princeton’s Space Studies Institute to develop and test lunar teleoperations simulators.
During the 1990’s, Dr. Uzzo served on numerous advisory boards for educational institutions, as well as facilitating major technology initiatives amongst K-12 public/private schools, higher education and government to improve STEM literacy. His work on various projects important to conservation include ecosystems studies that were instrumental in blocking offshore oil drilling in New York waters and a cross sound bridge in Oyster Bay, as well as cleanup planning for superfund sites. He has worked on preservation and open space projects on Long Island and the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. He holds a PhD. in Network Theory and Environmental Studies from the Union Institute.
Projects
Publications
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Teaching Children the Structure of Science, Paper 7243-6 Proceedings of SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis, 2009, San Jose, CA
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The Man Who Spoke to Stones (Chapter in anthology “Terra Nova – Writing the Future: Progress and Evolution”), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 2004
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Imaging in Extreme Environments: Proceedings, 2nd International Design for Extreme Environments Assembly, 1993, McGill University, Centre for Northern Studies, Montreal, PQ.
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Discrepancies in Color Reproduction Technology: Computer Output Technology Course Notes (Course #1) Association for Computing Machinery, SIGGRAPH Conference, 1989, Boston, Mass.
Conferences
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Sylvia Perez, vice president of education services, oversees all of NYSCI’s student programs including After-School Science Clubs, Schools Out! Innovation Camps, and Science Outreaches, as well as a vast array of professional development programs for teachers. She is responsible for creative curriculum design and the correlation of science concepts with national science standards and the needs of schools, students and teachers.
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She has been at NYSCI for more than 10 years, and has more than 15 years of experience expanding informal education and youth development programs. Throughout her time at NYSCI, she has initiated several new and exciting science programs including Girls In Science, Early Childhood Science, Maker Space, Learning Labs, and most recently, the Digital Making Studio.
Ms. Perez has a bachelor's from the University of South Dakota in anthropology with a minor in archaeology and a master's in museum studies from City College.
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Michelle Riconscente, deputy director of research for SciPlay, has spent over 20 years designing, implementing, and evaluating innovations in technology to support evidence-centered design approaches to assessment. In her current work, Dr. Riconscente extends evidence-centered design principles and tools to the design and evaluation of learning experiences that integrate simulations and game-making with content-area learning and motivation.
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Previously an assistant professor of educational psychology and technology at the University of Southern California, she authored the first controlled study of an iPad learning app, and her research on student motivation included mixed-methods investigations of U.S. and Mexican students' subject-matter interest. At the Coalition of Essential Schools, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and Education Development Center's Center for Children and Technology, Dr. Riconscente designed software to support alternative assessments and contributed to evaluations of large-scale technology programs. She has served as a consultant to several organizations, including Scholastic Inc., The Carnegie Corporation of New York, UCLA's CRESST, Motion Math Games, and the U.S. Department of Education. She holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics-physics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Rebecca Reitz, senior manager of the Science Technology Library,is known as “The Librarian” to the families, educators, staff members and school groups who frequent the library. She dedicates herself to creating a warm and welcoming learning space.
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Information Science, Rebecca has worked in several school libraries in Manhattan. She became a fan of the Science Technology Library while visiting NYSCI with her daughter, so she "jumped at the opportunity" to run the Library.
Matching the patron with the resource is her favorite part of being a librarian. She believes this is easy at NYSCI because the Library holds a collection of diverse learning materials representing a wide range of disciplines, sources, points of view, difficulty levels, and formats that accommodate various learning styles, interests, and purposes. Introducing her patrons to authors and illustrators, helping teachers teach and guiding young scholars in their science fair research satisfies Rebecca’s own librarian mission.
A native New Yorker, Rebecca is chair of the Library Committee at her daughter’s school, Hunter College High School, and a member of a local group, Urban Librarians Unite.
Prior to her librarian life, Rebecca worked in the public relations field, most notably with jazz musicians, concerts and clubs. Rebecca also worked as a program editor at A&E television. She continues her interest in artistic expression at NYSCI by appreciating science through the filter of poetry, painting and music.
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