Olszewski-Kubilius Wins Palmarium Award
Northwestern University’s Paula Olszewski-Kubilius has been awarded the Palmarium Award for her pioneering vision of talent development and leadership in the field of gifted education.
Olszewski-Kubilius, the longtime director of the School of Education and Social Policy’s Center for Talent Development, will deliver a keynote speech on March 18 at the 2022 Gifted Education Policy Symposium and Conference at the University of Denver.
The award comes as the Center celebrates its 40th anniversary, Olszewski-Kubilius has directed Center since 1983, creating a community of learners and one of the top talent development programs in the world.
“While the award is given to an individual, it really recognizes the collective of people that I have had the honor to work with over the years to bring creative approaches and research to better foster talent among all children,” she said.
Olszewski-Kubilius’s talk, titled “A Future Path for Gifted Education: Understanding and Promoting Domain Specific Talent Development” will address the field’s shift from general giftedness to talent within different fields. She’ll explain the pathways approach used at the Center for Talent Development, one that views giftedness as a process or journey that develops potential, rather than focusing on giftedness as a personal characteristic.
Throughout her career, Olszewski-Kubilius has created a wide variety of program models to meet the need of diverse gifted learners, including online learning programs, summer, and weekend programs. She has written and published extensively about issues in gifted education, with a particular focus on developing the talent of underserved gifted students.
Her latest books include The Handbook of High Performance: Developing Potential into Domain-Specific Talent and Unlocking Potential: Identifying and Serving Gifted Students from Low-Income Households, which have both been named “Book of the Year” by the National Association for Gifted Children.
Olszewski-Kubilius, a past- president of the National Association for Gifted Children and the Illinois Association for Gifted Children, has served as editor of Gifted Child Quarterly and co-editor of the Journal of Secondary Gifted Education. She has been an editorial board member for Gifted and Talented International, Roeper Review, Journal for the Education of the Gifted, and Gifted Child Today.
She is currently the vice chair of the board of trustees of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and serves on advisory boards for the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary and the Robinson Center for Young Scholars at the University of Washington.
Olszewski-Kubilius and her coauthors have received several awards for their publications, including the Gifted Child Quarterly Paper of the Year Award in 2011, 2017 and 2020; The Gifted Child Quarterly Paper of the Decade in 2020; the Mensa Education and Research Foundation Award for Excellence in Research in 2013; and the National Association for Gifted Children Scholarly Book of the Year Award in 2018, 2019 and 2020. She received the Distinguished Service Award in 2016 from the National Association for Gifted Children and the Distinguished Scholar Award in 2009.