Infant and Child Studies

Dr. Anderson is the Director of the Hearing Brain Lab and Associate Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. She received her Ph.D in Auditory Neuroscience from Northwestern University and her Au.D from the University of Florida. Before arriving at UMD, Dr. Anderson was a practicing clinical audiologist for 26 years. Her research interests include neurobiology of speech perception, learning-associated neural plasticity, aging, hearing loss, and auditory development.

Dr. Butler is the Co-Director of the Cognition and Development Lab. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. He received his Ph.D from Stanford University and completed his postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His work focuses on social learning and social cognition in early childhood. More specifically, he examines the interplay between the capacity to learn information about the world through inferences and the ability to selectively learn from others.

Dr. Edwards is the Director of the Learning to Talk Lab. She is also a professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and an associate director of the Language Science Center. Her research centers on how children learn the sounds and words of language and how this relates to language skills, literacy and school success. She investigates how children learn to talk across a wide range of language experiences - multiple languages, cochlear implants, autism spectrum disorders, and mainstream and non-mainstream dialects of English..

Dr. Feldman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies with a main research focus in computational psycholinguistics. She is also affiliated with the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab and the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science here at UMD.

Dr. Fox is the Director of the Child Development Lab. He is also a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. He received his Ph.D in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard University and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association of Psychological Science. Dr. Fox's research interests include temperament and emergence of anxiety in children, development of emotion and emotion regulation, and the effects of early experience on brain and behavioral development. He is a principal investigator of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project.

Dr. Huang is the Director of the Language and Cognition Laboratory, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. She received her Ph.D in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Cognitive Psychology program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is a member of the Maryland Language Science Center, and Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. Dr. Huang’s research interests include language acquisition, and psycholinguistics, and implementation science.

Jeff Lidz is the Director of the Project on Children’s Language Learning and is one of the founders of the Infant and Child Studies Consortium. He is a Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the Department of Linguistics, and is a member of the Maryland Language Science Center and the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Delaware and has held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Dr. Lidz studies children’s first language acquisition and the relation between language and non-linguistic cognition.

Dr. Newman is the Director of the Language Development & Perception Labs and one of the founders of the Infant and Child Studies Consortium, as well as the Autism Research Consortium. She is also the Chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and an Associate Director of the Maryland Language Science Center. She received her Ph.D from SUNY-Buffalo. Dr. Newman is also a member of the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. Her research interests include speech perception, language acquisition, listening in noise, word recognition, and autism.

Dr. Prather is the Co-Director of the Cognition and Development Lab. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology with a specialization in Educational Psychology. He received his Ph.D in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His post-doc research was conducted at Indiana University in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Some of his main research interests are cognitive development, computational models, early math and number learning, and cognitive neuroscience.

Dr. Ramani is the Director of the Early Childhood Interaction Laboratory. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. S Dr. Ramani's research focuses on understanding how children's social interactions influence their cognitive development in the areas of mathematics and problem solving. Specifically, Dr. Ramani examines how children learn early math and problem-solving skills through play and informal learning activities, such as playing with games and blocks. She also investigates how peer interactions, parent-child interactions, parental beliefs, and the early home environment can contribute to children's development in these areas.

Dr. Redcay is the Director of the Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UMD. Her research examines relations between brain and social development in children and adolescents with and without autism.. Dr. Redcay is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UMD. She received her Ph.D in Psychology and Cognitive Science from the University of California-San Diego. Her postdoctoral fellowship was completed at MIT's Brain and Cognitive Science Department.

Dr. Riggins is the Director of the NeuroCognitive Development Laboratory where she studies memory development by examining changes in neural substrates in infants and children. Dr. Riggins is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology at UMD. She received her Ph.D in Child Psychology from the University of Minnesota and was a postdoctoral fellow at both the M.I.N.D. Institute at the University of California-Davis and the University of Maryland School of Medicine.