Louis Gomez is an Associate Professor of Learning Science and Computer Science at Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley (1979) and a B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1974).

Professor Gomez is one of the directors of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS), a partnership made up of the Chicago Public Schools, Detroit Public Schools, University of Michigan, and Northwestern University. The Center is dedicated to collaborative research and development with urban schools that will bring the current state-of-the-art in computing and networking technologies into pervasive use in schools so that they will integrally support science and other curriculum.

Professor Gomez also co-directs the Learning through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project at Northwestern University. The CoVis project focuses on bringing next-generation computing and communication technologies, along with open-ended scientific inquiry, to high school classrooms. In this and other projects, Professor Gomez’s primary interest is working with school communities to create effective curriculum that supports school reform while connecting schools to external broad communities of practice, like the scientific community.

Before joining the faculty at Northwestern, Professor Gomez was director of Human-Computer Systems Research at Bellcore in Morristown, New Jersey. Over the last several years, he has also pursued an active research program investigating techniques that improve human use of information retrieval systems and techniques that aid in the acquisition of complex computer-based skills.

Professor Gomez joined CAST’s Board of Directors in December 2003.