I&CS in action!
Meet Our Faculty
Samira Anderson
Dr. Anderson is the Director of the Hearing Brain Lab 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. She is an Assistant Professor in the department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. Her research interests include neurobiology of speech perception, learning-associated neural plasticity, aging, hearing loss, and auditory development.
Jonathan Beier
Dr. Beier is the Director of the Lab for Early Social Cognition in the Department of Psychology. Along with being a member of the Infant and Child Studies Consortium, he is also a member of the Field Committee in Developmental Science and the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. Prior to UMD, Dr. Beier received his Ph.D in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University and completed his postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. His research interests including understanding other people's mental states and how social relationships influence one's own social behavior.
Lucas Butler
Dr. Butler is the Co-Director of the Cognition and Development Lab. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. He received his Ph.D from Stanford University and completed his post doctoral 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.
Jan Edwards
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. She received her Ph.D in Speech and Hearing Science at Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on how children learn the sound system of their language and how this affects vocabulary knowledge and lexical processing ability. Her research focuses on language acquisition in children who speak both mainstream and non-mainstream dialects of English as well as children with autism spectrum disorders and children with cochlear implants.
Naomi Feldman
Dr. Feldman is an Assistant 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.
Nathan Fox
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.
Bucharest Early Intervention Project.
Yi Ting Huang
Dr. Huang is the Director of the Language and Cognition Laboratory. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences with a research focus on language acquisition and psycholinguistics. 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. In addition to her membership with the Infant and Child Studies Consortium, she is also a member of the Maryland Language Science Center, Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and Center for the Advanced Study of Language.
Jeff Lidz
Dr. Lidz is the Director of the Project on Children's Language Learning and is one the founders of the Infant and Child Studies Consortium. He is a Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the Department of Linguistics here at UMD. He received his Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of Delaware. He previously was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and the École normale supérieure in Paris. Dr. Lidz's research interests include comparative syntax-semantics and first language acquisition.
Rochelle Newman
Dr. Newman is the Director of the Language Development Lab 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 the 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, word-finding errors, word recognition, and autism.
Richard Prather
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. Cognitive development, computational models, early math and number learning, and cognitive neuroscience are among some of his main research interests.
Geetha Ramani
Dr. Ramani is the Director of the Early Childhood Interaction Laboratory. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. She received her Ph.D in Developmental Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and did her postdoctoral work in cognitive development at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Ramani's research interests include the influence of social interactions on cognitive development, learning through cooperative play early mathematics & problem solving skills, and peer cooperation.
Elizabeth Redcay
Dr. Redcay is the Director of the Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UMD where she studies joint attention, the role of communicative context, and the development of brain networks for social cognition in both typical individuals and individuals with 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.
Tracy Riggins
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 an Assistant 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.