Mark McDaniel is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Director of the Center for Integrative Research in Cognition, Learning, and Education (CIRCLE). He received his Ph.D. from University of Colorado in 1980. His research is in the general area of human learning and memory, with an emphasis on prospective memory, encoding and retrieval processes in memory and applications to educational contexts. His educationally relevant research includes a series of studies on elaborative study techniques, learning of science categories, and enhancing learning through testing (repeated retrieval), with much of this latter work being conducted in college and middle school classrooms. His research has been sponsored by the Institute of Educational Sciences, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
McDaniel has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and as president of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association and of Division 3 (Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science) of the American Psychological Association. He has published over 300 journal articles, book chapters, and edited books on human learning and memory, and is the co-author with Peter Brown and Henry Roediger of the book: Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press, 2014).