Dr. Mel D. Levine - Introduction
Introduction: Dr. Mel D. Levine
Dr. Melvin D. Levine is a pediatrician who has devoted his career to the study of learning and development. In particular he has focused on school-aged children who are not succeeding in school. He has developed a framework for understanding the specific strengths and weaknesses of their minds while identifying discrete breakdowns that have thwarted their learning and/or productivity. He advocates an approach that emphasizes the management of strengths and affinities and does not make use of diagnostic labels.
Prior to his retirement in 2007, Dr. Levine was a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina. For 23 years he directed the University’s Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning (CDL). Dr. Levine was an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School before moving to North Carolina, having served as the Director of Ambulatory Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital in Boston for 14 years.
Dr. Levine was an undergraduate at Brown University from which he graduated summa cum laude and was class valedictorian. He then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and subsequently graduated from Harvard Medical School. Following his pediatric training, Dr. Levine served as a physician in the United States Air Force and received The Meritorious Service Award for his work with children and adolescents.
Dr. Levine is the author of numerous textbooks, including A Pediatric Approach to Learning Disorders, Developmental Variation and Learning Disorders, Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, and Educational Care. In addition, he has written a number of books for parents and the general public, among them A Mind at a Time (number one of The New York Times bestseller list), The Myth of Laziness, and Ready or Not, Here Life Comes. Also, he is the author of several books aimed principally at children with learning difficulties. Dr. Levine has written nearly 200 papers in the scientific literature.
Dr. Levine was the cofounder of All Kinds of Minds, a program to train teachers in the use of his model of neurodevelopmental assessment and management. He is currently the director of Learning Ways, Inc. whose website amindatatime.com, provides information and practical tools to help parents and professionals understand and meet the unique needs of individual growing minds.
Throughout his life Dr. Levine has sustained a strong affinity for animals. He now lives in North Carolina with his wife, Bambi, on Sanctuary Farm, where they are caring for about 200 geese, 13 swans, 42 pheasants, 2 emus, 4 East African Crowned Cranes, 5 curassows, 16 mammoth donkeys, 1 horse, one mule, 5 dogs, 7 cats, and a cage full of finches.
