Keith Sawyer

Morgan Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Keith Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of the world’s leading scientific experts on creativity and learning. He has edited or authored 16 books, including a textbook overview of creativity research, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2012), and an influential handbook on scientific studies of learning, The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press. 2014). He has published over 100 scientific articles.

He combines this scientific expertise with a strong hands-on background in real-world creativity. After receiving his computer science degree from MIT in 1982, he began his career with a 2-year stint designing videogames for Atari. He has been a jazz pianist for over 30 years, and spent several years playing piano with Chicago improvisational theater groups, while working towards his PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago. In his current research, he is studying teaching and learning in professional schools of art and design.