As fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Kristin Simmers settles into what she describes as her “dream job” at Forman School in Litchfield, so too are UConn and her new employer settling into a partnership built around learning and research opportunities for students and faculty at both educational institutions.
While conversations with Forman, a boarding and day-school for students with learning differences including dyslexia and ADHD, began before Simmers came on in July as its director of cognition and learning, her ties to UConn are what she says made her stand out as the best person for the newly established position.
“When people would ask me what I wanted to do after my Ph.D., I would describe this job and then quickly say, ‘But those jobs don’t exist,’” she says. “So, when this opportunity came up, a role that serves neurodiverse learners where the primary goal is forming research practice partnerships, that’s just a dream opportunity.”
Simmers says she’s still plugging away after-hours on her dissertation in learning sciences, within UConn’s Department of Educational Psychology in the Neag School of Education, and spending much of her workday developing synergies between Forman and her soon-to-be alma mater.
Part of Waterbury’s Neurovariability Initiative
Fumiko Hoeft, campus dean and chief administrative officer at UConn Waterbury, says she’s known of the nearly 100-year-old Forman School for decades through her work as a neurophysiologist studying the brain and dyslexia, but hadn’t sought more formal ties until about a year ago when the regional campus’s Neurovariability Initiative started to take shape.
The initiative, which started last spring and which Hoeft and engineering professor Arash Zaghi co-created, aims to cultivate a learning environment in Waterbury that uses educational neuroscience, AI-enhanced tools, and Universal Design for Learning to help UConn students succeed. The other goal is to attract more diverse learners to campus.
“UConn Waterbury is a small campus with 750-plus students,” Hoeft says. “These kinds of small environments are well equipped to teach a diverse student body. We often know the students’ names and faces. They can stop by offices easily in a one-stop-shop structure, so it’s less confusing.”
In talking with Forman about offering Early College Experience, or ECE, courses to give its students UConn credit for classes taken in high school, Hoeft says she learned the school in northwestern Connecticut hired Simmers to head its cognition and learning center that opened in a new building in 2025.
Hoeft says she already knew Simmers from UConn’s TRANSCEND Ph.D. training program, in which fellows study the neuroscience of education, teaching, and learning with a focus on neurodiversity. When Simmers came on at Forman, a UConn partnership was natural.
“Our job is to get our students ready for college, while keeping a finger on the pulse of what college is going to look like for these students, which is changing quickly with AI,” Simmers says of Forman. “When you think about the different learning profiles of our students, we need to know what we’re preparing them for.
“Having a close working partnership with a university that’s literally right down the road and is putting resources into thinking about how to make their campus neurodiversity inclusive is incredibly beneficial,” she continues. “Knowing where our students are headed helps to inform our support for them in these four years leading up to college.”
Helping Students Succeed
Simmers says that many of Forman’s roughly 200 students come to the school after having had negative school experiences, including sometimes being told outright that college is not a place for them.
And while Forman’s faculty and staff don’t dismiss the trade professions and other post-secondary opportunities, Simmers notes that as a college-prep school they work with those who want to go to college to develop ways to succeed in that environment.
While that starts with getting them academically prepared and giving them the necessary executive functioning skills, the simple act of just walking around a college campus, whether Storrs or Waterbury, can be incredibly powerful, she says.
That’s one reason Forman students have attended UConn Waterbury’s WISHfest each April and in October were invited to participate in an event to kick off Dyslexia Awareness Month there.
It’s why Hoeft was a panelist at Forman during its October event, “Telling Our Way: A Day of Film and Neurodivergent Celebration,” which screened the documentary “Hopeville,” a film about the science of reading in Waterbury public schools. It’s also why Forman has invited Zaghi for a STEM activity he often presents that delves into his own neurodiversity and how it’s influenced his life.
Both Hoeft and Zaghi also have accepted seats on the school’s inaugural Research Advisory Board.
“I get so excited that Forman is a school that serves students with learning differences, but also explicitly teaches them how their brains actually work and learn,” Simmers says. “That’s been a passion of mine for over 20 years now and is a natural connection for some of the work that Fumiko and Arash do.”
Simmers says that Forman can offer to UConn researchers looking at things like learning differences, gifted education, or dyslexia a student population primed for study. In turn, the resulting research conclusions can only help the next generation of Forman students.
For instance, she says a friend working on their doctoral dissertation is analyzing how executive functioning challenges manifest in different settings. With Forman’s boarding population, he’d be able to follow a range of students not just during the school day from math class to athletics, but also in extracurricular activities, nighttime study groups, and social get-togethers.
“You could observe learners literally from the time they get up until the time they go to bed and get such a rich dataset that we don’t have in the literature right now,” she says. “We absolutely benefit from having experts and researchers come to us and help us better understand our students, our practice. And, I think the larger research community benefits from having really specialized research on a really unique group of learners.”
Forman also is partnering with Stanford University’s ROAR project, or Rapid Online Assessment of Reading, and with developers from the Harvard Innovation Labs on an app that helps with educational instruction.
Uncovering What’s Next
When Amy Clemons, Forman’s head of school, came on two years ago, she says she was tasked with developing its cognition and learning center and with hiring a director, only the search firm contracted to do so admitted it was struggling even to write a position description.
Clemons decided to cancel the search, settle into her own role for six months, and reevaluate, she says, explaining that’s when she wrote the position description herself and instead of posting it, decided to start talking with others who could lead her in the right direction.
That networking uncovered a line to Simmers.
“Kris is unique in the sense that she was an educator and now a researcher, someone who understands a great deal about how the brain works and the learning behind it,” she says. “She’s able to pull those pieces together, but she’s also so easy to have a conversation with. She’s so accessible in the way she describes why all of this matters to how we support our students and helps you understand. She’s magical in the way that she is so good at what she does, and other people can access it through her.”
Clemons says that through the last 100 years, Forman became insular, not looking outward for partnerships or to share the findings it was making. There were few conference presentations or connections with outside academics.
Its Board of Trustees recognized that wasn’t sustainable, especially in today’s connected world, and decided to make a turn.
“We have to be out in the world participating with what’s going on as much as we’re doing what’s right for our students here,” Clemons says. “Whether it’s best practices or ongoing research, I can imagine the connection with UConn will utilize what both schools see as next steps for the education of our students in a way that drives it forward.”
Hoeft admits that’s her ulterior motive.
“I’d love to see more of these partnerships grow in high schools, where younger students take classes on our campus if they’re ready, so they get acclimated to the college experience and are more likely to choose UConn Waterbury,” she says. “They might have some challenges, but they have tremendous strengths. It’s part of our Neurovariability Initiative and thinking about how to cultivate their strengths.”
