SRI International

October 13, 2026 Across four large urban school districts, teachers are delivering strong, explicit phonics instruction using high-quality instructional materials. But students have fewer chances to build vocabulary and apply their skills to real sentences and stories — the “bridging processes” that connect decoding words to actually understanding them.

Senior Director of Strategic Development Lawrence Lee is Senior Director of Strategic Development at SRI, where he leads the cross-functional strategy team in SRI’s Commercialization Group called the SRI Refinery, which validates and refines technologies from research into a sustained pipeline of commercial R&D, licensing, and venture transactions.

October 7, 2026 A recent New York Times article covered how hardware companies are adding menopause-related features to their wearables. The reporter turned to SRI’s Fiona Baker, director of our human sleep research program, for a scientist’s perspective. Baker explains that the sleep stages these devices report are estimates, not equivalent to measuring what’s happening in the brain, and that a metric like heart-rate variability can show that something changed without explaining why.

Artificial Intelligence, News and stories, The Future of Work and Education October 5, 2026 SRI’s PARC Forum discussed AIs impact on the scientific community and how its shaping future discoveries. At last week’s PARC Forum, SRI CEO David Parekh and insitro CEO and co-founder Daphne Koller sat down with Stephan Mergenthaler, CTO of the World Economic Forum, to talk about a shift already underway: AI as an accelerator for scientific discovery. The conversation moved from the present to what’s next.

October 2, 2026 Cabinet Office and Japan Science and Technology Agency approve David Schwartz and Kenji Yoshihira to lead research themes under Japan’s Global Startup Campus Initiative. SRI today announced that its Global Startup Campus team is complete. Japan’s Cabinet Office has approved David Schwartz and Kenji Yoshihira as Venture Directors.

September 30, 2026 Former Lockheed Martin ATL Managing Director and DARPA Program Manager to lead institute-wide high-growth programs. SRI today announced that Robert “Robbie” Mandelbaum has joined the institute as Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives. In this role, Mandelbaum will drive SRI’s major growth initiatives, bringing together capabilities from across SRI’s research divisions to create, scale, and lead new programs that span the institute.

Citation Rutherford-Quach, S., Schmidt, R. A., Alozie, N., Coole, M., Navia Jaramillo, S., & Yee, K. (2026). Evaluation of accelerating literacy through self-regulation, collaboration, and persistence: Reading Apprenticeship North Carolina. Final report. SRI. Nationally, adolescent reading performance has continued to decline, even as younger students have begun to regain lost ground.

Artificial Intelligence, News and stories, Ventures September 29, 2026 The new smartphone platform gives growers a single, verified record across various programs. A buyer wants to know where the beans were grown. A sustainability assessor walks the rows. A lender and an insurer arrive with questions of their own. Each collecting information and moving on.

September 28, 2026 A rare class of neurons upends a century of thinking about how the brain produces sleep. Thomas Kilduff, director of SRI’s Center for Neuroscience, is a co-author on a new paper in Nature, led by Renata Batista-Brito of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The study identifies a rare group of cortical neurons that actively promote sleep, challenging the long-held view of the cortex as a passive follower of signals from deeper brain structures.

September 25, 2026 A new study from SRI, conducted for AERDF’s Reading Reimagined program, offers rigorous evidence on phonics instruction for grades 4–8. SRI evaluated Sounds-Write, a structured linguistic phonics (SLP) program that takes a “speech-to-print” approach.