Dan Rothstein cofounded RQI in 1990 and currently serves as interim executive director and co-director of its Research Program.
Dan and his colleague Luz Santana developed the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a method used globally across fields such as education, legal empowerment, health care, and voter engagement. He has co-authored two books, Make Just One Change and Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions. Dan is an adjunct lecturer in professional learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he co-taught the course, “Building Nimble and Democratic Minds: From Practice to Theory and Back to Practice.”
He is a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded grant, in collaboration with Northeastern University, to develop a rubric for creating socially impactful research questions. He also helped develop RQI’s model for increasing patient activation in health care, work that was funded by a National Institutes of Health research grant.
Dan has led participatory keynote sessions at events hosted by the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation, Google, the New Hampshire Bureau of Adult Education, state and national education conferences, Harvard Medical School, and many other organizations. He holds a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was an editor of the Harvard Educational Review.