P. Karen Murphy (Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1998) is Distinguished Professor of Education and Department Head at The Pennsylvania State University where she holds appointments in the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education and the Social Science Research Institute. Her research focuses on the role of critical-analytic thinking in the processing of disciplinary content including the development and implementation of interventions, like Quality Talk, that maximize the effects of reasoning and classroom discussion on students’ comprehension and content-area learning. Funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation, her ongoing projects pertain to the role of critical-analytic thinking and reasoning in elementary mathematics teacher education and the identification of academically productive talk across content areas, ages, and settings. Murphy frequently publishes in such prestigious journals as the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Psychologist, Journal of Educational Psychology, or Contemporary Educational Psychology. She is the Senior Editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology and the outgoing Editor of the Review of Educational Research, a former Executive Editor of the Journal of Experimental Education, and former Associate Editor of Learning and Instruction and serves on the editorial boards of numerous other journals including the South African Journal of Education and the Journal of Educational Psychology. Active in several international organizations, Murphy is an elected member of the National Academy of Education as well as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the American Psychological Association.