Michael Graziano and his wife, Sabine Kastner, are both professors at Princeton University with seemingly esoteric subjects of academic interest.
Both enjoyed what Graziano describes as “entirely normal” childhoods. The son of a psychology professor and a lawyer, he grew up in Buffalo, New York, and attended Princeton University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1989 and a PhD in psychology and neuroscience in 1996. He has been on the faculty since 2001 and a tenured psychology professor since 2007. His current focus is on consciousness.
Kastner grew up in Hannover, Germany, where her father was a government administrator. She holds advanced degrees from the University of Dusseldorf and the University of Gottingen. She is also a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton. Her work is on the neural basis for attentional mechanisms.
Graziano and Kastner now live in Princeton, where they send their son, a second grader, to one of the Princeton Public Schools’ four elementary schools.
By all accounts, the child’s path to that second grade classroom has been anything but normal. Graziano, who has written several novels as well as children’s books (under the pseudonym B.B. Wurge), told his story in an essay titled “An Inconvenient Child” that was published on Aeon (www.aeon.co), a “digital magazine of ideas and culture” based in the United Kingdom, on February 20. It is can be seen on Aeon’s site at https://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/how-apraxia-got-my-son-suspended-from-school/
