I am a faculty member in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas . I am currently running two laboratories, one at UT Dallas Callier Center for Communication Disorders focusing on the neurological correlates to language acquisition and development and one at the Center for BrainHealth investigating neurological processing in disordered populations.
My research spans across the interactions of three different areas: language acquisition, neuroimaging, and development. In language acquisition my main focus is how children acquire verbs, looking at both the semantic and grammatical aspects that develop in verb acquisition. In electrophysiology I focus primarily on using Event Related Potentials, or ERPs, to study neurological processes that correlated with cognitive processing in children and adults. In terms of development I investigate how various populations differ in terms of neurological processing across a lifespan. I currently run the Developmental Neurolinguistics Laboratory at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders and the Electrophysiology laboratory at the Center for Brain Health.
I received my undergraduate degree in Psychology from Penn State University. After spending a year as a research assistant at Carnegie Mellon University at the Center for Cognition and Brain Science I completed my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek at Temple University. From there I returned to research in neurocognition during my postdoctoral work with Dennis Molfese at the University of Louisville.