 For about two years, I've been working on a book about the science of learning, and there's all these incredibly interesting new advances that science has brought us about how we learn, how we remember, how we apply our skills. And for the New America Foundation Fellowship, I'll be looking specifically at how we can apply those scientific findings to the project of training and retraining millions of American workers to best use their skills in the 21st century workplace. For my New America Fellowship, I'll also be looking at how we can apply advances in learning technology to train workers in many cases outside of traditional school settings in their own workplaces in their homes. There's just a whole host of new options for training and teaching workers. Well, there's a lot of research showing that there's a big skills gap, that even as we have this high unemployment rate, relatively high unemployment rate, there's a lot of highly skilled, highly paid jobs that are going unfilled because we don't have American workers who have those skills and that knowledge. So this is a problem that I think the science of learning can really assist with. We know better now how to teach people, how to teach adults in particular new knowledge and new skills. We have new ways of delivering this knowledge via technology. And so I think the moment is right to really apply these new phenomena to this pressing problem of a skills gap in the American workforce. Yeah, I've written about psychology and social science for my entire career as a journalist. And it's just, to me, the most interesting question on earth is what makes people tick? How can we change behavior in positive ways? And learning to me is the most hopeful of the subjects at social science studies because learning is change and learning opens new possibilities. So my previous book was about the science of prenatal influences, which was fascinating to me. I was pregnant while I was writing it, but a lot of it felt very deterministic. There's not much you can do if things went wrong during your fetal life. But I feel enormously hopeful about this new field that I'm studying now, the science of learning, because the horizons are completely open in terms of what everybody can do at any age as long as learning is a part of the process.