Jill Fitzgerald is currently Research Professor in the School of Education at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jill is a former primary grades teacher and reading specialist. She has published extensively in a wide range of research and practitioner journals, including Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, Journal of Educational Psychology, Research in the Teaching of English, American Educational Research Journal, and The Reading Teacher. Jill has also authored and co-edited several books, including the Handbook of Writing Research. Her current primary interests center on academic vocabulary, conceptual complexity of vocabulary, text complexity for beginning readers, literacy for multilingual learners, and writing. She has won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Review of Research Award and the International Reading Association’s Dina Feitelson Award for Research (with George Noblit) and is an American Educational Research Association Fellow. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Educational Psychology and serves on editorial boards for several national and international research journals.  She has also been a review panelist for the Office of Education, National Institute of Health, and National Institute for Literacy and has provided extensive service to local, national, and international literacy and educational associations.