Dr. Schank was the Founder of the renowned Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where he is John P. Evans Professor Emeritus in Computer Science, Education and Psychology. He was Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Yale University and Director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project. He was a visiting professor at the University of Paris VII, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Stanford University and research fellow at the Institute for Semantics and Cognition in Switzerland. He also served as the Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a fellow of the AAAI and was founder of the Cognitive Science Society and co-founder of the Journal of Cognitive Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Texas.

In 1994, he founded Cognitive Arts Corporation, a company that designs and builds high quality multimedia simulations for use in corporate training and for online university-level courses. The latter were built in partnership with Columbia University.

In 2002 he founded Socratic Arts, a company that is devoted to making high quality e-learning affordable for both businesses and schools.

He is the author of more than 20 books on learning, language, artificial intelligence, education, memory, reading, e-learning, and story telling. The most recent are Virtual Learning, Coloring Outside the Lines: Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules, Scrooge meets Dick and Jane, Engines for Education, and Designing World Class E-Learning.