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Faculty

Dr. Frank Manis (Email) (Departmental Website)

Professor, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Graduate Program
Faculty Fellow, Center for Excellence in Teaching
Ph.D. Child Psychology, University of Minnesota, 1981.

My work focuses on the cognitive, psycholinguistic and neurobiological bases of reading in children and adults, dyslexia, learning disabilities, and development of literacy in a second language. Recent projects focusing on dyslexia include an investigation of brain activity in the occipito-temporal junction (or visual word form area) in dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults (with Zhong-Lin Lu, and graduate students Jennifer Bruno, Allison Zumberge and Jason Goldman), experiments on the perception of noise in visual and auditory stimuli (with Lu, graduate student Rachel Beattie, and USC undergraduate Jason Batten) and fluency-based interventions for middle schoolers with persistent reading problems (with Sally Spencer, education doctoral student). I am also conducting a 9-year ongoing longitudinal study of Spanish-speaking children learning to read, in collaboration with Kim Lindsey, Research Assistant Professor at USC.

Dr. Joann Farver (Email) (Departmental Website)

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
Ph.D. Psychology, UCLA, 1989

Professor Farver's research and teaching specialties are in the area of development psychology, especially the social development of young children (including play, prosocial and aggressive behavior); cross-cultural developmental psychology; and violence and young children; and early literacy. Professor Farver's current research projects include: 1). Examining the effects of community violence on preschoolers and their families in the Los Angeles inner city; 2). Cross-cultural studies of Mainland Chinese school age children's social development and socio-emotional functioning; 3). Carrying out a large scale, 6-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to enhance the emergent literacy skills of at-risk inner city preschoolers, on which she is the Principal Investigator.

Graduate Students

Jason Goldman (Email) (Website)

M.A. Developmental Psychology, University of Southern California, 2009.
B.A. Psychology (Minor: Religion), University of Southern California, 2007.

Jason is in his third year of the graduate program in Developmental Psychology. He is interested in how people learn new skills, and particularly, the way that the environment interacts with biology in producing skilled behavior. His Masters project concerned the relationship that exposure to print (an environmental variable) has on the structural development of the brain regions that comprise the "reading network" in adults. A new collaboration with Dr. Laura Baker and Dr. Hanna Damasio will investigate the same issue in children and in twins. A project with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang at the Brain and Creativity Institute looks at the role that culture and emotion play in moral reasoning. A new research project with Dr. Justin Wood is investigating various innate capabilities of non-human animals, and how the environment may impact those abilities. He is Psychology and Neuroscience Editor for ResearchBlogging.org and writes about animal cognition (human and non-human alike) on a blog called The Thoughtful Animal at Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs.com

Rachel Beattie (Email)

M.A. Psychology, University of Southern California, 2008.
BSc (Hons) Psychology, Staffordshire University, 2006.

Rachel is a doctoral candidate in the Developmental Psychology PhD program. In her fourth year, she is continuing to investigate several perceptual theories regarding the etiology of developmental dyslexia. In addition to cognitive and behavioral measures, her projects incorporate assessments of adult and children's abililty to exlcude noise in both visual and auditory modalities as well as measures of children's perceptual experience of rhythmic timing. Additionally, she is working with Dr. Zhong-Lin Lu and Gui Xue on the Language Learning Project, a study investigating cross-linguistic differences in the effectiveness of using different phonological routes when learning a novel language. Her dissertation research is a longitudinal study that focuses on clarifying the role of segmental and supra-segmental phonology in the transition from pre-reader to reader.

Erin Zomber (Email)

Zhisen (Marina) Jiang (Email)

Zhisen (also goes by Marina) is interested in the behavioral, cognitive and neural processes of Chinese reading in both normal and atypical readers, and their similarities and differences as compared with reading in alphabetical languages, especially English.  Her Master’s project focused on the role of phonology in silent reading of Chinese and its relationship with reader’s reading fluency level.  She hopes her research will contribute to clarifying the controversy over the topic and informing research on atypical readers such as dyslexics. 

Collaborators

Dr. Zhong-Lin Lu, USC (Email) (Lab Website)

William M. Keck Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and Biomedical Engineering
Co-Director Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center
Ph.D. Physics, New York University, 1992

Zhong-Lin Lu obtained a PhD in physics from New York University in 1992, he worked as an Assistant Researcher in Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine before joining the faculty of the University of Southern California in 1996. He is currently the William M. Keck Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience, Professor of Psychology and Biomedical Engineering at USC, and co-Director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center. At USC, Lu established the Laboratory of Brain ProcessES. The goal of his research program is to construct computational brain models for perception and cognition. Currently, Lu is working on: (1) Computational & psychophysical study of visual and auditory perception, attention, and perceptual learning, (2) Functional brian imaging study of sensory and attentional processes, and human decision making, and (3) Visual deficits in dyslexia, amblyopia & Alzheimer's disease. In 2002, Lu was elected Overseas Evaluation Expert of the Chinese Academy of Science. In 2003, he won the first Young Investigator's Award of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and became the youngest Fellow of the Society.

Dr. Elaine Andersen, USC (Email) (Departmental Website)

Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics,
Professor of Neuroscience, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Ph.D. Linguistics, Stanford University, 1978

Elaine Andersen is Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Among her career interests and research pursuits, she has specialized in exploring the relationship between language and cognition across the lifespan, with studies of child language acquisition in several languages, including English, Spanish, French, and Basque. Most recently she has turned her research interests to understanding the cognitive, neuro, and social factors impacting early literacy, an interest she pursues in part through her service as a board member of the Bring Me A Book Foundation. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Spencer and the March of Dimes.

Dr. Robert Rueda, USC (Email) (Departmental Website)

Professor, USC Rossier School of Education
Ph.D. Educational Psychology/Special Education, UCLA, 1979

My current research interests focus on sociocultural processes in motivation, classroom learning, and instruction, with a focus on reading and literacy. I am particulary interested in students who are English learners, students who are in at-risk conditions, and students with mild learning handicaps. I am also interested in teaching/learning issues related to academic achievement in public school settings, including literacy-related assessment and instruction and educational decision-making.

I am currently designing a series of studies on motivation in reading (reading engagement). I have formed a small research group (MICLL - Motivation, Instruction, Cognition, Learning, & Literacy Research Group) that has been meeting regularly on these issues designing measures and beginning to develop proposals. Most recently we have started to investigate the beliefs that teachers possess about literacy motivation and the extent to which these beliefs are activated and realized in instructional planning and classroom interaction with students in grades 4 through 8. The goal of this program is to work collaboratively with school districts to develop and implement teacher professional development and student intervention leading to increased student motivation, and ultimately, improved literacy achievement.

Meghan Goldman, UC Irvine (Email)

M.A. Psychology, Pepperdine University, 2009.
B.A. Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2007.

Meghan is a first year Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of California, Irvine. She is interested in the cognitive processes involved in reading development and developmental dyslexia. Meghan assisted in conducting research on children with and without a family history of dyslexia at Harvard Medical School this summer. She also has previous experience working with children with learning disabilities as a reading tutor. 

Dr. Kristi Clark, UCLA (Email)

Dr. Bruce McCandliss,
Cornell/Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology (Departmental Website)

Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry,
Weill Medical College of Cornell University

Undergraduate Students

ALUMNI

Allie Zumberge Orechwa (Email)

Allie is currently a research scientist/specialist at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). A division of the US Department of Education, IES funds applied education research and publishes reports on effective practices in education to inform the public, practitioners, and policy-makers.

As a graduate student in Neuroscience, Allie was interested in the neural correlates of skilled reading. Her dissertation was aimed at understanding the relationships between reading ability and fMRI activation levels within phonological regions, as well as patterns of connections between those regions. Other areas of interest include behavioral genetics and language acquisition.

Jennifer Bruno (Email) (Website)

Jen completed her final year of the Developmental Psychology graduate program at USC in 2008. Her dissertation is on the metabolic, morphometric, and functional correlates of reading and dyslexia in the brain.

Jen is now a postdoctoral fellow at the The Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the assessment and treatment of cognitive deficits related to medical problems, particularly cancer. Research methods include neuroimaging and neuropsychological assessment.

Sally Spencer (Email)

Sally is currently a full-time faculty member in the Department of Special Education at California State University, Northridge. She completed the Ed.D. program at USC in 2008. Her areas of interest are in teacher preparation, particularly in teaching reading and collaborative service models. Sally has taught students grades K-6 in a variety of settings and schools throughout Los Angeles, including self-contained special education classes, pull-out programs, and as a co-teacher in a variety of inclusive settings. She was the recipient of the 2001 Special Educator of the Year award from the California Chapter of the Council for Exceptional Children, and was a 1999-2000 Leadership Grant Recipient from the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education. She presents nationally on the topics of teaching reading to students with mild/moderate disabilities, as well as inclusive practices and co-teaching.

Jason Batten

USC Class of 2008. Majors: Health and Humanity, Piano Performance.