Biography

I was born in Palo Alto, attending Jordan Middle School and Paly High School. At Paly I was awarded the Ivan Linder Creative Writing Prize for Poetry and Playwriting, having had poetry published and a one-act play produced.

Heading east, I attended Connecticut College, earning a B.A. in English Literature and a minor in Studio Art. I was fortunate to work with Poet Laureate William Meredith while at Connecticut College.

I then received two masters degrees from Lesley College Graduate School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first masters was in Education. The second one was a combined Special Education and Expressive Art Therapies degree. My graduate work involved internships at Perkins School for the Blind, and at Boston Children's Hospital Neurology Ward working therapeutically through the arts with patients while under clinical supervision.

Subsequent jobs in Massachusetts and New Jersey were in public and residential school programs that serviced autistic, learning disabled, psychotic and schizophrenic children.

Returning to California I began a Perceptual and Sensory-Motor Program (K - 6) at Diablo Valley Montessori school in Lafayette.

From 1993 to 1995, I worked at Walter Hayes. I then moved to Escondido School, where I have been ever since. After my first year at Escondido, I became one of 5 finalists (out of 3,000 teacher entries) for the TeachEach Charles Schwab Foundation Award which recognized a teacher's ability to work with special needs students. This competition involved writing a series of essays on educational practices and philosophy, in addition to classroom observations and interviews.

Ms. Nita at age five getting read a book by her dad		Together with her husband Bob on Maui, working

In 2003, I worked with students of the Stanford STEP Program and with undergraduate students taking technology courses who wanted to develop software for elementary classrooms. One of these collaborative software programs on the study of the Mars rovers was published in the fall of 2004. Subsequent collaborations with undergraduate Stanford students have involved developing and piloting science curriculum. In 2008-2009, I hosted a UC PhD Psychology candidate for her school-site based internship.

My students and I have been fortunate to be chosen over the past several years to participate in the Palo Alto Art Center's Cultural Kaleidoscope Program. This program assigns us a professional artist, who visits both our class and our East Palo Alto "buddy class" for collaborative art instruction. This community outreach program is fully funded and ensures that East Palo Alto students will receive badly needed art supplies and instruction.

In 1978, I married M.I.T. graduate Bob Laughlin. He has been a theoretical physicist at Stanford University for 25 years and is the 1998 Nobel Prize recipient in Physics for his work on the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. Between July 2004 and July 2006 Bob was the first foreign President of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, Korea. Bob and I love to travel, garden, visit mountains and beaches, and share a commitment to be strong, effective, creative educators.