Neal Lerner Biography

Neal Lerner is a Lecturer in Writing Across the Curriculum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he supports undergraduates in classes that fulfill MIT’s communication-intensive requirement. While his primary teaching assignment is a scientific communications workshop attached to a sophomore biology lab class, he also has worked regularly with MIT students in a junior-level biology lab, in political science research methods, in a management psychology class, in an electrical engineering lab, and with graduate teaching assistants in architecture and chemistry. He also teaches a first-year writing class that involves a service-learning writing project for a foundation dedicated to research on a rare disease.

Professor Lerner has a Doctor of Education degree from Boston University and a Masters in Creative Writing and Secondary Education Teaching Credential from San Jose State University.

Previous to coming to MIT, for five years Lerner was a faculty member and Writing Program/Writing Center Director at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. From 1990 to 1992 he taught English classes at Montgomery College, Germantown.

Lerner has led faculty workshops on writing across the curriculum at MIT, Marquette University, Louisiana State University, Loyola College in Baltimore, Knox College, the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences, Wheelock College, Newberry College, Frederick Community College, and the University of Maryland University College.

Lerner is co-editor (with Elizabeth Boquet) of The Writing Center Journal, a peer-reviewed bi-annual journal of research and theory on writing centers, and co-author (with Paula Gillespie) of The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring, 2^nd ed. He has published over 25 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the history, theory, and assessment of teaching writing, and is a three-time recipient of the International Writing Centers Association Outstanding Scholarship award. Lerner also presents his work regularly at regional and national meetings and has been a keynote or invited speaker at 10 conferences or seminars. Lerner’s current writing a book on the history of teaching both writing and science via “laboratory methods” and collaborating with two MIT colleagues on a book/research project about teaching communications to science and engineering students.