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Upcoming Workshop
The Neurocognition of
Developmental Language Disorders
A CBBC Workshop
Speaker Bios Judith A. Cooper, PhD, is Deputy Director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders at the NIH. She also serves as Director, Division of Scientific Programs, within NIDCD, and has programmatic responsibilities for the areas of language, language impairments, and language in deaf individuals. She received her B.F.A. in Speech-Language Pathology at Southern Methodist University, her M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology at Vanderbilt University, and her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in Speech and Hearing Sciences. She was elected a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2006.
Mabel L. Rice, PhD, is the Fred & Virginia Merrill Distinguished Professor of Advanced Studies at the University of Kansas. She directs the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, the Child Language Doctoral Program, and the NIDCD-funded Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences of Communication Disorders. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at MIT, Harvard, the University of Potsdam, and Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and a Japan Fellow. Her main fields of research are language acquisition and language impairments in children. She is a Fellow of AAAS and APA, and received ASHA Honors.
Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, PhD, is Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and Head of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London Institute of Child Health. Together with her colleagues, Professor Vargha-Khadem has made a series of discoveries concerning the ontogenetic neural bases of episodic and semantic memory in developmental amnesia, speech and language dysfunction associated with the FOXP2 gene mutation, and differences in the capacity for functional reorganization in the developing brain as compared with the mature brain.
Michael Ullman, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience, Psychology, Linguistics and Neurology; Director of the Brain and Language Lab (brainlang.georgetown.edu); and Co-Director of the Center for the Brain Basis of Cognition (cbbc.georgetown.edu) at Georgetown University. He studies and teaches issues in the neurocognition of language and its relation to memory in first and second language, in developmental and adult-onset disorders, and in variation within and between subjects (due to genetic variability, endocrine fluctuation, pharmacological manipulation, and factors such as sex and handedness).
Susan Ellis Weismer, PhD, is Professor of Communicative Disorders and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also holds affiliate faculty positions in the Departments of Psychology and Educational Psychology. Her research, which has been funded by the NIH, has focused on understanding the developmental course and mechanisms underlying language disorders in late talkers, children and adolescents with specific language impairment, and children on the autism spectrum.
Angela D. Friederici, PhD, is director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and honorary Professor at the Universities of Leipzig, Potsdam and Berlin. Dr. Friederici studied Linguistics and Psychology, received her PhD from the University of Bonn (Germany), and spent her post-doctoral period at MIT. Her main field of research is the neurocognition of language, particular language comprehension. She is member of the International Neuropsychological Symposium, the German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina, and Vice-President of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.
Marc Joanisse, PhD, is an Associate Professor at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. He holds appointments in the Psychology Department and in the Neuroscience and Linguistics graduate programs. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and an undergraduate degree from McGill University in Montreal. His research focuses on phonology and speech processing, and how phonological factors influence both typical and impaired processing of grammar. This work has employed a number of techniques including connectionist modeling, eyetracking, functional MRI and event-related potentials. He currently holds a New Investigator grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.