Jean Bragg Schumaker, Ph.D., S.E.P., is a child psychologist, certified trauma therapist, and award-winning researcher who devoted her career at the University of Kansas to developing effective programs that help struggling learners learn. When she realized some students needed something more, she began a project to understand how childhood trauma was affecting their learning and learn about possible ways of healing their trauma. During her thirty-plus years of providing Somatic Experiencing Therapy to traumatized children, teenagers, and adults, she gained many insights about childhood trauma which she shares in her book, Transcending Childhood Trauma with Somatic Therapy.
Professor Emeritus at The University of Kansas
For 50 years, Dr. Schumaker taught students and conducted research at the University of Kansas. She was Principal Investigator for federal grants totaling more than $80 million. She guided the education and research of more than 40 doctoral students.
Certified Trauma Therapist
Trained by Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Diane Heller for five years, Dr. Schumaker became certified by the Foundation for Human Enrichment as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP). She has assisted them and other faculty members of Somatic Experiencing International in training hundreds of new SEPs.
Developer and Publisher of Instructional Materials
Dr. Schumaker is President of Edge Enterprises, Inc., a research and publishing company founded in 1985. This organization has developed, validated, and distributed numerous instructional programs for teaching academic and social skills to struggling students under the umbrella of The Strategic Instruction Model (SIM). Tens of thousands of students and teachers have benefitted.
Dr. Schumaker has developed and validated fifteen programs for teaching complex learning strategies that students can use to complete tasks at the secondary and post-secondary levels of education. She has developed and validated more than ten Content Enhancement Routines for subject-area teachers. She has written and published more than 150 articles and published many books as well as paper-based and digital instructional programs. She was named to the lists of the World’s Best Research Scientists by Research.com starting in 2023 and the list of Top Scholars by Scholars GPS in 2024.
She received the Division for Learning Disabilities, Council of Exceptional Children (CEC) Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Learning Disabilities in 1996 and the same organization’s Jeannette Fleishner Award for her research accomplishments in 2006. She received the Distinguished Achievement Award from her alma mater, Lawrence University, in 2004. She has served on the Professional Advisory Board for the Learning Disabilities Association of America, and she is a past President of the Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD), the largest division of the CEC. She received the Samuel A. Kirk Award for Outstanding Publication from DLD in 2010 and in 2021 and the Don Deshler Leadership Award from the Instructional Coaching Group in 2014.
Jean lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with her dog, Rosie.