As The Story Collider’s inaugural Director of Education and Research, Leslie oversees our workshop programming, trains and supervises our team of instructors, and fosters interdisciplinary research collaborations focused on the impact of personal narratives. In her former life as a college professor, she specialized in inclusive pedagogy and teaching for social justice and garnered four national teaching awards from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Leslie holds a Ph.D in Psychology (with concentrations in Brain & Cognitive Science and Social Psychology), and her writing has been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. She is also the doting human to two (flawless) rehabilitated street pups and a long-suffering fan of the New York Mets.

Find her @leslie_bern on Twitter and at leslieb@storycollider.org