Dr. Schwartz received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in Learning, Cognition, and Instruction in 1981. Since that time, he has been actively engaged in the study of graphical displays as they influence learning, comprehension, perspective, and persuasion. He conducts research with a group of talented graduate students who come from programs in psychology in the U.S. as well as the IGRE-- an international consortium of research laboratories in education, psychology, and technology at the universities of Bari (Italy), Cyprus (Cyprus), Dresden (Germany), Grenoble (France), Koblenz-Landau (Germany), and Salzburg (Austria). Together he and his colleagues and students test basic theories of multimedia learning, distributed cognition, and metacognition in education, law, engineering, publishing, and the arts.

Dr. Schwartz currently serves as the U.S. Coordinator of the International Cognitive Visualization Program-- a dual master's program in cognitive visualization-- in France, Germany and the U.S. He has served as Senior Research Fellow at NASA's Classroom of the Future and Visiting Professor at the University of New England in Australia and the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. He serves as board member on a number of scientific journals and publishes his work in scientific journals, edited books, and scientific meetings worldwide.