Leadership

As CTY’s executive director, Amy Lynne Shelton is dedicated to designing, delivering, and studying innovative educational models and approaches intended to support a diverse community of advanced learners, their families and educators, and other collaborators in the field.

Amy is committed to CTY’s mission to advance the field of gifted education as a center of innovation through research and evidence-informed approaches to identification, education, and support of advanced learners and their families. Before becoming CTY’s executive director, she served as the center’s senior director for research and founded the CTY Baltimore Emerging Scholars Program. Amy previously led CTY in an interim capacity, navigating the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges it posed for CTY, its students and their families. A professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education, she has held joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and served on the steering committee for the university wide Science of Learning Institute. Her administrative experience includes work at the department, school, and university levels.

CTY is committed to serving the needs of advanced learners and advancing the field of gifted education through our research. Through a culture of innovation and improvement, our goal is to transform how we identify and nurture the young scholars who will become the world’s future problem solvers, all while retaining what makes CTY special: its programs and its core mission.

Before joining CTY, Amy served on the faculty in JHU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience focuses on spatial skills, individual differences, and mechanisms of learning, couched in the broad context of understanding the characterization and needs of each individual learner. More recently her work has focused on how these fundamental skills can be used to identify and characterize students’ educational needs.