Dr. Alice Wilder Joins BIF Board of Directors

Posted by Melissa Withers on September 23, 2009

Educational psychologist, kids television guru and all-around amazing woman Alice Wilder has joined the Business Innovation Factory’s Board of Directors. Alice is no stranger to BIF. In 2006, she was a storyteller at the BIF-2 Summit, where she talked about her early work designing new programming for kids. In the years following, Alice has stayed in close contact and we’ve had the pleasure of watching her work evolve. [read more and watch a video of alice in action]

“From our first introduction, the BIF team was blown away by Alice’s passion for innovation in children’s entertainment,” says BIF executive director Melissa Withers. “Alice approaches everything with a deep and joyful intelligence. She’s an innovation powerhouse and someone you want to dinner with. We are honored that she has joined BIF's board of directors and looking forward to applying her ideas to our work.”

Alice bases her work in formative research on the philosophy that ‘the only way to understand what children are capable of doing, what appeals to them, and what they know, is to ask them!’

As a producer and director of research and development for Nick Jr.’s break-out preschool series Blue’s Clues, Alice was part of the creative team responsible for all content and creative decisions related to every aspect of the series. She conducted all the formative research used in the creation and production of the series, and all of its ancillary businesses including publishing, online, magazine, consumer products and special events. Her ground-breaking work has been written about in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book The Tipping Point.

In this role, she co-authored the curriculum on which Blue’s Clues and Blue’s Room were based, and wrote scripts, books, educational workbooks, and columns for the magazine and on-line. She has been nominated for Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Preschool Children’s Series as well as Outstanding Writing in a Children’s Series.

Currently, Alice is Co-Creator and Head of Research and Education for Super Why! Airing on PBS Kids, Super WHY! is the only preschool property created to help kids learn the fundamentals of reading through interactive storybook adventures.

She also is the co-creator of Think It Ink It Publishing a new venture that is designed to promote creative writing for children from the ages of 4-12 years old. As the importance of writing is being equated with the importance of reading her professionally illustrated wordless picture books provide an entertaining and motivating platform for children to practice writing and be published.

Prior to joining Nickelodeon, Wilder served on a variety of research teams at Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), Columbia University and Skidmore College. Additionally, she was Program Data Coordinator at PBS, Manager at Children’s Workshop, and Assistant Teacher at Kindercare.

A graduate of Columbia University’s Teachers College, Wilder earned her doctorate in Educational Psychology in May 1998, and was awarded the Miriam Goldberg Research Award for her dissertation and the 1999 Early Career Award from Teachers College. While at Teachers College, she conducted instructional and theoretical studies focused on human cognition and learning working with junior high school students with learning disabilities. For her undergraduate studies, she attended Skidmore College where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and in the Fall of 2005 received an Alumni Periclean Scholar Award.

An expert in educational and child psychology, Wilder has written numerous articles for journals related to the field and frequently presents at national conferences, in college and graduate school courses, in workshops for parents, as well as at events such as the Business Innovation Factory. She is Past President of the Teachers College Alumni Council and on the advisory board for the Speyer Legacy School, Teachers College School Partnership Advisory Council, Sandbox Summit, and the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden at the New York Botanical Garden.