Jean Schumaker

Jean Bragg Schumaker, Ph.D., S.E.P., has been guiding Somatic Experiencing sessions for thirty years. In her day job, she is the President of Edge Enterprises, Inc. a research and publishing company devoted to developing and distributing instructional programs for students who have difficulty learning. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas where she earned her doctorate in developmental and child psychology in 1975 and worked for 37 years. She has extensive research experience in the area of teaching struggling learners. She has developed and validated fifteen programs for teaching complex learning strategies that students can use to complete tasks at the secondary and post-secondary levels of education. She has developed and validated more than ten Content Enhancement Routines for subject-area teachers. She has written and published more than 150 articles and published many books as well as paper-based and digital instructional programs. She was the Principal Investigator on grants funded for more than $80 million. Dr. Schumaker received the Division for Learning Disabilities, Council of Exceptional Children (CEC) Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Learning Disabilities in 1996 and the same organization’s Jeannette Fleishner Award for her research accomplishments in 2006. She received the Distinguished Achievement Award from her alma mater, Lawrence University, in 2004. She has served on the Professional Advisory Board for the Learning Disabilities Association of America, and she is a past President of the Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD), the largest division of the CEC. She received the Samuel A. Kirk Award for Outstanding Publication from DLD in 2010 and in 2021 and the Don Deshler Leadership Award from the Instructional Coaching Group in 2014. She was named to the lists of the World’s Best Research Scientists in 2023 and Top Scholars in 2024.