Dr. Ellen Quart’s professional work has been devoted to bridging the gap between psychological research and its application, particularly in the field of education. She began her career as an elementary teacher, and has caught regular and special education from elementary through high school. Dr. Quart received all four of her degrees from the University of Michigan. She studied under William Cruikshank and William Morse, renowned in their fields of learning disabilities and emotionally disturbed children, respectively.Her doctoral work on memory disorders in Reye’s syndrome survivors, found a heretofore undiscovered predisposition of learning disabled children to contract the disease. She has continued to make contributions to the areas of learning disabilities, head injury, and memory disorders.
Dr. Quart spent 14 years as a research neuropsychologist on the Intensive Care Unit at Children’s Hospital of Michigan where she developed assessment tools to measure pain and stress in young patients. As the 1990-1991 American Lung Association Award recipient, she worked to improve the quality of life for vencilator-dependent children and their families.
Simultaneously, Dr. Quart has been a consultant to the Ann Arbor Public Schools since 1982. She was the leader in the implementation of the State mandated student portfolio project. As a Goals 2000 grant recipient, she developed an interdisciplinary math-science technology program (MASTER), later adopted at all high schools in Ann Arbor. As part of that project, she initiated a vocational mentorship program, pairing local businesses with high school students who were at risk for dropping out of school.
In 1994 Dr. Quart joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. In a combined area of clinical and developmental psychology, she teaches courses that focus on the psychological needs of children. Appreciating the fact chat many students fail in school because their basic psychological needs are not being met, she helped found and is the current director of the MICHIGAN Mentorship Program. It pairs U of M students with children from 6-19 years of age who are failing in school. It has proven to be a mutually beneficial experience for both the university students and those in the public schools.