• People
  • Faculty
  • Administration
  • Other Academic Personnel
  • Departmental Associates
  • Staff
  • Students

People

Faculty

 

Principal Investigator

Dr. Susan Levine

Susan Levine is a professor in the Department of Psychology where she serves as chair of the developmental psychology program. She is also a core faculty member on the newly formed Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She received her B.S. at Simmons College and her Ph.D. at M.I.T. Dr. Levine's research examines how variations in home and school input affect the cognitive development of children, including language, spatial and mathematical skills. She also examines plasticity of language and cognitive skills following early brain injury.
Email: s-levine@uchicago.edu
Link to: Susan Levine's CV and publications

Graduate Students

 

I am interested in early language development of both typically-developing and atypically-developing children. My current research focuses on cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture. Specifically, I am interested in whether gesture can contain information that is not expressed in speech, and thus can be used to augment the tools provided by children's spoken languages. My second line of work focuses on early language learning in children with early unilateral brain injury. Currently, I am investigating their verb learning and its relation to the development of representations that underlie verbs in other domains, e.g. gesture and motor abilities.
email: ece@uchicago.edu
Website:(http://psychology.uchicago.edu/academics/doctoral/cognition/students/ecedemir.shtml)

My interests are in the area of language development. In my research, I examine the relation between language input and language development for monolingual and bilingual children. Currently, I'm using naturalistic methods to study the relation between children's exposure to English and Spanish and their subsequent bilingualism. My work on language input has also included using syntactic priming techniques to assess syntactic development in monolinguals and bilinguals. In addition, my research has focused on language learning in bilingual education programs in the areas of literacy and science.
email: perla@uchicago.edu
Website:(http://psychology.uchicago.edu/academics/doctoral/developmental/students.shtml)

I am interested in how parental input in the pre-school years affects children's numerical cognition. I am currently investigating what types of naturalistic social, linguistic, and experiential contexts are most helpful to children's early development of numeracy skills. In addition, I am interested in how early number input relates to later academic success in math and science.
email: lizgunderson@uchicago.com

Mee-Kyoung Kwon

I am interested in number development in both typically developing and atypically developing children. My research interests can be categorized into three topics: 1) what the young infant representation of number is like, 2) how young children's understanding of number can be improved, and 3) how similar/different number development in young children with early unilateral brain injury is to/from number development in typically developing children.
email: mkwon@uchicago.edu
Website:(http://psychology.uchicago.edu/academics/doctoral/cognition/students/Mkwon.shtml)

My current research builds on the notion that our cognition is embodied. Developmentally, cognition builds on our experience as biological organisms moving around the world and acting on things. I'm interested in exploring how the notion of embodied cognition may shed light on our understanding of the human mind.
email: sjyang@uchicago.edu

Postdocs

I am interested in how humans acquire grammar, and in how that acquisition and development continue through life in response to changing patterns of language use. I am pursuing these questions in the realm of phonological development in both children and in adult developing bilinguals, testing behavioral and online sensitivity to emergent lexical probabilities. I am also interested in how various cognitive abilities interact with communication in both language and gesture.
email: carlsonmt@uchicago.edu

Joan Fisher

My post-doctoral research is being conducted as part of the longitudinal program project involving Susan Levine, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Janellen Huttenlocher and Steven Small. My primary role is to investigate language and gesture development in children with unilateral lesions acquired early in life. I have developed a storytelling task to investigate the influence of different kinds of input on the development of narrative skills in both typically developing children and children with early brain injury.
email: joan@uchicago.edu
Website: (http://home.uchicago.edu/~joan/)

Moshe Krakowski is a post-doctoral fellow in the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center at the University of Chicago. His research for the center focuses on the impact of classroom spatial representations on student spatial reasoning.
email: mkrakows@uchicago.edu

Kristin Ratliff

Kristin received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Oklahoma in 2001 and her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Temple University in 2007. In her graduate work with Nora Newcombe, Kristin studied spatial cognition and navigation, specifically the circumstances under which geometric and nongeometric information is utilized during reorientation. Kristin's postdoctoral research interests include the development of spatial understanding and concepts, mental rotation, and early quantitative development as it relates to measurement and map use.
email: krratliff@uchicago.edu

Elena Zinchenko

Research Assistants

Claire Bradley

Claire is a Research Assistant at the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center.  She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2008 with a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish.   While at the University of Minnesota she was involved in research in the areas of auditory perception and linguistic relativity.  She plans to pursue a graduate degree in Developmental Psychology.
email: cbradley1@uchicago.edu

Elizabeth Hickey

Elizabeth is a research assistant in the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center at the University of Chicago.  She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Iowa in May, 2008.   In 2007, she worked as a research assistant at the University College London with Dr. Nilli Lavie in the Cognitive Attention Lab.  At Iowa, she worked with Dr. John Spencer in the Children's Developmental and Infant Cognition Lab.  She is interested in pursuing a graduate degree in Developmental or Educational Psychology, while continuing to work with children in educational settings.
email:Elizabeth Hickey <emh225@gmail.com>

 

Alums

 

Graduate Students

Stacy Ehrlich - Researcher at NEIREL Education Development Center. Stacy's main interests are in the area of early math development, particularly in relation to the educational setting. Her research has included examination of teacher input in Head Start vs. middle-income preschool classrooms and its' relation to student achievement. She is also involved in research on sex differences in early spatial skills, and the effects of training and gesture on children's improvment on mental manipulation tasks. Stacy is currently a Research Associate at the Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory (NEIREL) at Education Development Center in the Boston area. NEIREL is contracted under IES to provide research and technical assistance to the states in the northeast region to support educational policy decisions.

Stella Lourenco - Assistant Professor at Emory University
Department of Psychology
532 Kilgo Circle, Room 323
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Office phone: 404-727-7448
Lab phone: 404-727-2988
Faculty website: http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/lourenco/index.html
Lab website: http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/lourenco/lab

Linda Whealton Suriyakham - Linda is a Clinician at the Stonington Institute in Stonington, CT, and works with adolescent girls in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. She is doing postdoctoral clinical coursework at the Massachusetts School for Professional Psychology in Boston, MA.
email: whealton@uchicago.edu

 

Postdocs

Ty Boyer
I was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Chicago, Department of Psychology from August 2005 to August 2007. I received a BS from Arizona State University in 2000, and PhD from the University of Maryland in 2005. While at UofC Susan Levine, Janellen Huttenlocher, and I did a number of projects that analyzed the development of quantitative and spatial reasoning. One large project involved a detailed analysis of elementary school aged kids abilities to process proportional information, and the sorts of things that might contribute to errors in solving proportion problems. I am presently a postdoc in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Indiana University and can be reached at tywboyer@indiana.edu .

Joanna Cannon

Raquel Klibanoff

Tracy Soloman

 

RAs and other affiliates

 

Karyn Brasky

Elaine Croft

Kristin Duboc

Jennifer Griffin

Erica Mellum

Molly Nikolas

Jana Oberholzer

Lilia Rissman

Jessica Saunders

Becky Seibel

Julie Wallman

Alexa Webster-Clark

 

Top of Page