Announcement from the Director:
I am delighted to announce that Dr. Alexis Black will be joining our School as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Developmental Communication Disorders, starting January 2020.
Dr. Black is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Haskins Laboratories. Her research focuses on the nature of early linguistic representations, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin their formation. She completed her Doctoral degree in Linguistics (Cognitive Systems Stream) at the University of British Columbia in 2018 under the supervision of Dr. Carla Hudson Kam. Her dissertation explored perceptual and developmental constraints on the implicit segmentation of speech into word-forms by infants, children, and adults. She received an NIH Fellowship in 2018 to study the neural mechanisms of word learning. Through this fellowship, and in collaboration with Drs. Richard Aslin, Bob McMurray, James Magnuson, and Nicholas Turk-Browne, Dr. Black is adapting machine-learning classifier techniques to the analysis of EEG and hemodynamic brain signals. One goal of this research is to develop methods for detecting individual differences in early sound- and word-learning processes, which could then be used as a tool for early diagnosis of language disorders.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Black to our School!