Primary Job Title Co-Founder & VP, Research Primary Organization 
Foundations in Learning
Location Iowa, United States, North America Regions Midwestern US Gender Male
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Jerry Zimmermann, Ph.D., J.D. received a B.A. in psychology from Brown University (1968), an M.S. in Speech Pathology and Audiology (1971) from Southern Illinois University, and a Ph.D. in Speech Science (1973) from the University of Iowa. His research at the University’s Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic earned him the distinction of being
a leading authority on stuttering.
Dr. Zimmermann received two postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Iowa (1973, 1974-76), both of which were supported by the National Institutes of Health. In addition, he earned his J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law (1987) and worked for several years as an attorney at law in private practice (1987-1993).
As colleagues at the University of Iowa, Drs. Brown and Zimmermann began research in how young children make the transition from oral language to print. Through several years of intensive investigation with children and teachers, they developed an approach to teaching reading that provided instructional balance at the level of the individual child. They combined unique, diagnostic and instructional, interactive software with comprehensive professional development, long-term follow-up coaching for teachers, and engaging instructional materials. The result was called Foundations in Reading, a classroom-based program that is now known as Breakthrough to Literacy®. In 1997, Breakthrough, Inc. became a part of The Wright Group, one of the nation’s largest publishers of children’s literature. Today, Breakthrough to Literacy is part of McGraw-Hill School Education.
In 2005, Drs. Brown and Zimmermann co-founded the nonprofit organization, The Iowa Language and Literacy Institute, with the mission of improving lives by improving literacy. They have continued to focus on obtaining results in classrooms by providing an effective conceptual framework of language and literacy development for teachers and the tools to reach each child. Drs. Brown and Zimmermann developed and implemented the curriculum for the internet-delivered reading intervention, Access Code. They also serve as adjunct professors in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa.
