A Tribute to Dr. Sam Weintraub (July 20, 2026)

At the time of this tribute, Dr. Sam Weintraub is 99 years old, living independently, addressing and answering emails, and asking for items to read on the topic, “the science of reading.”

Dr. Sam Weintraub began his academic research career in 1960 with an Ed.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to this, he earned two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s from The Ohio State University.  He also held a post-doctoral research position in the University of Chicago Reading Clinic.  After serving professorships at the Case-Western University of Cleveland, the University of Chicago, and Indiana University, he was Professor at The State University of New York at Buffalo from 1974 to 1995.

As an academic, Sam was perhaps best known for his special talents for editing, reviewing, and summarizing. Among his most notable achievements, he led the Annual Summary of Investigations Related to Reading from 1968 to 1997. Originally, the Summary was established by William S. Gray in 1925 as a monograph, and subsequently led by Helen Robinson until Sam’s tenure at the helm. During Sam’s leadership, the Summary was an annual, supplemental issue of the Reading Research Quarterly (funded by the International Reading Association). From its inception, it was intended to provide the field with annotated access to all research related to reading published each year. Under Sam’s leadership, in the university library halls, doctoral students scoured the physical international literature holdings for reading research accomplished across relevant fields within and beyond reading education (e.g., developmental medicine and child neurology, psycholinguistics, media studies, sociology, and deaf education). Each identified study was xeroxed and sent on to Sam. Sam and invited editors wrote abstracts of each study. To provide a sense of the size of the task, in each of the final years of its publication, over 1,000 studies were included.

Leading the Annual Summary certainly required a patient and persistent hand, but even more significantly, the helm required someone who had an inquiring and open mind. In the days prior to the existence of the internet, the Annual Summary was an invaluable resource. In retrospect, it likely served as a gateway to pronouncing which research, which topics, and which type of research mattered for the field. Sam must have had some sense of the importance that inclusion in (and exclusion from) the Annual Summary represented as he attempted breadth in naming what counts as reading and what counts as reading research.

Sam was also co-editor (with Roger Farr) of Reading Research Quarterly from 1969 to 1979. As an editor of the then-premier journal on the topic of reading research, Sam was well known in the academic halls to be an editor with high standards, but also a supportive and encouraging editor.

Throughout his academic life, Sam provided extensive service to the reading field in several venues, perhaps most notably, to the International Reading Association (now named the International Literacy Association). In 1997, he received the prestigious International Reading Association William S. Gray Citation of Merit Award for “Continuous leadership in dissemination of reading research through a lifetime of seminars, writings, editorships, and over 30 years of authoring and editing the Annual Summary of Investigations Related to Reading.”

Equally importantly, Sam is one of those people who could change the trajectory of students’ lives. He likely didn’t realize that doctoral students hoped he would have the time to take them on. Because of the academic work he accomplished for the Annual Summary and for Reading Research Quarterly, he knew the reading research field incredibly well—perhaps better than most academicians of the day—and consequently, he could support students who took on various reading research topics. Among his several talents as a mentor, Sam encouraged his doctoral students to read extensively, think critically, and be rigorous. He had a way of giving advice and support when it was most needed. In private office meetings, he didn’t offer sermons about how to improve our work. Instead, he had a way of asking questions that were the “just right” questions at the “just right” moments. He also left nuggets of information here and there about how to write research. If you were trying to figure out how to write the “review of the literature” chapter for your dissertation, Sam might say something like, “Well, there’s not just one way to do it. There are a lot of ways.” A nugget like that could leave a doctoral student with an “aha” moment and a freedom from the sense of having to write to an unknown formula.

Sam taught so well, and he did it with kindness, generosity, and notably—dry wit. He was, and still is today, well known for his affable wit that would light up your mind a second or two later. To this day, Sam remains an amazing academician, teacher, mentor, and yes, still a good friend who made an enduring impact on his peers, his students, and indeed, the field.

With love, respect, and immeasurable gratitude,

Jill Fitzgerald and Mary Anne Doyle