Faculty

SDSU – Active Doctoral Program Faculty

• Alyson Abel-Mills, Ph.D. (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Behavioral and neurophysiological methods to examine word learning and language processing in typically developing children and children with language impairment.
• Crystle Alonzo, PhD, CCC-SLP (Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences) – Child language and literacy development, with particular attention to developmental language disorder, dyslexia, and educational disparities. Her current work emphasizes implementation science and school-based services, including how speech-language pathologists identify and support children with language and literacy difficulties in complex educational systems. She also examines how cognitive abilities, language experience, linguistic diversity, and systemic inequities shape learning outcomes and access to effective assessment and intervention.
• Ashkan Ashrafi, Ph.D. (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) – Research focuses on stochastic signal processing, estimation theory, graph signal processing, graph inference algorithms, brain signal analysis, brain functional connectivity, matrix theory and applied linear algebra.
• Henrike Blumenfeld, Ph.D. (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Influence of bilingualism on language and cognition across the lifespan and in aphasia. Research methods include behavioral and eye-tracking methodologies to capture real-time processing as well as thematic analysis and community-participatory qualitative approaches to capture experiential dimensions of bilingualism.
• Jessica Barlow, PhD (Geography) – Child language acquisition and disorders, with an emphasis in phonology.
• Laura Coco, PhD, AuD, CCC-A (Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences) – Research focuses on advancing access and equity in hearing healthcare through the development and evaluation of innovative interventions and service delivery models. She employs a community-based participatory research approach to identify barriers, inform intervention design, and guide dissemination. Her work includes mixed methods clinical trials and implementation studies aimed at increasing hearing aid uptake and reducing noise exposure risk in Spanish-speaking Latino adults. Dr. Coco collaborates closely with clinicians and researchers in communication sciences, public health, and psychology to conduct community-engaged research that addresses barriers to communication across diverse populations.
• Laura Dreisbach, PhD, AuD, CCC-A (Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences) – Research interests are focused on characterizing auditory function at the highest frequencies of human hearing with the long-term goal of developing and implementing objective metrics to monitor and detect auditory changes that serve as an early warning system to imminent hearing damage that will compromise normal speech and language development or impair existing communication.
• Karen Emmorey, Ph.D. (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Research focuses on what sign languages can reveal about the nature of human language, cognition, and the brain. Dr. Emmorey studies the processes involved in how deaf and hearing people produce and comprehend sign language and how these processes are represented in the brain. Research interests also include bimodal bilingualism (i.e., sign-speech bilingualism) and the neurocognitive underpinnings of reading skill in profoundly deaf adults.
• Jennifer Felner, PhD (Public Health) – Leverages multiple methods and community-based participatory research approaches to examine and intervene on the upstream determinants of health inequities among youth, particularly LGBTQ+ youth and transitional-aged youth experiencing homelessness. Primary research aim is to advance health equity for youth and build community power to develop sustainable community health improvements.
• Inna Fishman, Ph.D. (Psychology) – Neurocognitive development in early childhood, with a particular focus on neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum and other related disorders with sociocommunicative challenges. Research methods include neuroimaging (functional, diffusion, structural MRI) in combination with clinical neuropsychology tools and behavioral assessments. 
• Margaret Friend, Ph.D. (Psychology) – Developmental psychology, processes of language comprehension and the developmental relation between language and emotion in communication.
• Gregory D. Keating, Ph.D. (Linguistics) – Second language acquisition and heritage speaker bilingualism. Focuses on sentence processing in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English and the factors that bear upon it, such as individual differences in working memory capacity and age of onset of bilingualism. Research techniques include eye-tracking (with text) and other behavioral techniques. 
• Tracy Love, Ph.D. (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Language processing in both language impaired and language unimpaired child and adult populations. Focuses on examining the nature of the information used during on-going language and cognitive processing.
• Ksenija Marinkovic, Ph.D. (Psychology) – Spatio-temporal characteristics of neural circuits underlying cognition, with a special interest in how the multistage word comprehension process unfolds in time across the brain. We have conducted studies on the impact of alcohol misuse and chronic pain on cognitive control and examined language functions in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.
• Katherine J. Midgley*, Ph.D. (Psychology) – Research interests include the cognitive and neural processes involved in language comprehension and production in monolingual, bilingual and deaf populations as well as those involved in acquiring a vocabulary in a second language.
• Ralph-Axel Müller, Ph.D. (Psychology) – Brain Development Imaging investigates the plasticity of the brain organization for language in healthy children, children and adults with focal brain lesion, and in patients with autistic disorders.
• Ignatius Nip, Ph.D., CCC-SLP (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Speech motor control and performance in children and adults with and without speech disorders. Relations among speech motor, language, and cognitive skills.
• Giang Pham, Ph.D., CCC-SLP (Speech, Language, and Hearing  Sciences) – Language development and disorders among bilingual children.  Her research interests include first and second-language developmental trajectories, cross-linguistic transfer, ethnic identity, and treatment for bilingual children with language impairment.
• Sonja Pruitt-Lord, PhD., CCC-SLP (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Research focuses on improving methods of assessment and intervention for children from minoritized backgrounds to prevent misdiagnosis of language disorders and reduce health and educational disparities
• Stephanie Ries, Ph.D. (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Research focuses on the brain dynamics of word retrieval and speech production in adults with communication disorders using behavioral measures, neuropsychology, surface and intracranial electroencephalography, and electromyography. Of particular interest are cognitive control processes and how these may be engaged or altered in communication disorders.
• Ashley Sanabria, PhD, CCC-SLP (Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences) – Research focuses on understanding the trajectories of language and literacy learning in Spanish-English bilingual students, with a focus on bilingual children with language-based disabilities, such as developmental language disorder (DLD) and dyslexia. Using evidence-based assessment approaches and classroom observational methods, her research aims to contextualize these trajectories within the opportunities children have to learn, with specific attention to the role of dual language vs. English-only educational contexts.
• JoAnn Silkes, Ph.D., CCC-SLP (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) – Research focuses on implicit language and cognitive processing in aphasia. In particular, she is interested in understanding language-specific versus domain-general processing impairments in aphasia, the interface between implicit and explicit processing, and methods of improving aphasia treatment by targeting implicit processes directly.
• Jessica Suhrheinrich, PhD (Education) – Research aims to improve community-based services for individuals with autism. Her current work integrates implementation science and leadership development to increase the use of evidence-based practices for autism.
• Peter Torre, PhD (Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences) – The primary research focus within the Recreational Noise Exposure and Auditory Function Lab is to evaluate how recreational noise exposure, specifically in undergraduate student music majors, affects auditory function. One goal of the lab is to determine if young adults are more at risk for earlier onset hearing loss because of their music exposure. Responses from the cochlea are measured using distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs) while a dosimeter is used for the measurement of the music exposure level, in decibels. By combining these data, an examination of how exposure levels affect DPOAEs and if young adults are exposed to music at hazardous levels. Further, our lab has partnered with a company to provide student music majors with custom earplugs in an effort to protect their hearing in these potentially hazardous exposures.

UCSD – Active Doctoral Program Faculty

• Anne Beatty Martinez, PhD (Cognitive Science) – Research agenda capitalizes on the diversity and variability in language experience to better understand adaptive change in cognition and in behavior. The primary aim is to lay a theoretical and empirical groundwork for how people’s interactional context supports and shapes cognition across the lifespan.
• Timothy Brown, Ph.D.(Neuroscience) – Research interests include characterizing developmental changes in the structural and functional organization of the brain from infancy into young adulthood and relating these changes to different aspects of psychological development. A primary goal of this work is to integrate information from across different anatomical and physiological imaging and recording modalities in order to capture multidimensional metrics of distinct developmental phases. Dr. Brown uses multimodal and multidimensional imaging techniques to characterize phases and changes in the growing brain’s anatomy.
• Leslie Carver, Ph.D. (Psychology) – Research on the brain basis of cognitive and social cognitive development using behavioral and electrophysiological (ERP) measures.
• Seana Coulson, Ph.D. (Cognitive Science) – Research addresses the cognitive and neural basis of meaning construction using linguistic, behavioral, and electrophysiological (ERP) techniques. Interests include embodied metaphor theory and the comprehension of jokes, sarcasm, and iconic gestures.
• Sarah Creel, Ph.D. (Cognitive Science) – Uses eye tracking and behavioral methods to examine how typically developing children and adults learn and comprehend language. In particular, she investigates how learners represent sound patterns in language (phonemes, words, accents, voices) and how this changes over time and with exposure to particular languages. Her work also extends into comparing language and music. Current projects focus on comparisons of speech perception and production in young children and L2 learners, and assessing relationships between musical pitch perception and diverse tone languages.
• Gedeon Deák, Ph.D.(Cognitive Science) – Research interests include cognitive and language development in preschool children including, for example, children’s ability to name or categorize an entity differently across situations, or to shift responses across changing problem. Also, how preschoolers learn the meanings of related words. A third line is infant communication, specifically the emergence and development of episodes of shared attention between infants and caregivers.
• Victor Ferreira, Ph.D. (Psychology) – Research interests include investigations of the mechanisms of language production, computational and quantitative modeling of cognitive processes, and development of methodological tools for investigation of cognitive and perceptual processes.
• Marc Garellek, Ph.D. (Linguistics) – Phonetics and laboratory phonology, in particular phonation types or voice quality: the ways in which speakers manipulate their vocal folds to produce sounds, and how listeners perceive these manipulations.
• Tamar Gollan, Ph.D. (Psychiatry) – Using bilingualism as an experimental tool for revealing the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying proficient language processing. Studies designed to reveal the joint consequences of bilingualism, aging, and Alzheimer’s disease for language production, language comprehension, and cognitive control.
• Frank Haist, Ph.D. (Psychiatry & Center for Human Development) – Brain basis of language, perception, and social cognition in typically developing child and adult populations, and in populations with neurological impairments. My work uses behavioral assessments together with functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
• Eric Halgren, Ph.D. (Neurosciences) – Research into the neural mechanisms of language and other cognitive processes, mainly with local field potential and unit recordings in humans, but also non-invasive imaging.
• Chuchu Li, PhD (Psychiatry) – Research interests include bilingual language control in comprehension and production, as well as speech planning more broadly. To use eye tracking and behavioral tasks to investigate how context, task demands, and language background influence the use of different control mechanisms across diverse populations.
• Rachel Mayberry, Ph.D. (Linguistics) – First and second-language acquisition in children and adults with an emphasis on age of acquisition effects on language knowledge and processing. Psycholinguistics of sign language, speech-gesture, and reading development in deaf and hearing populations.
• Jeanne Townsend, Ph.D. (Neurosciences) – The focus of research is the identification of brain structural and functional correlates of cognitive function, particularly the bases of attentional processes, and developmental changes in these relationships. Employ a variety of methods and techniques including neuropsychological and behavioral testing, neurophysiological recordings (EEG, ERP), structural and functional MR imaging.
• Martin Zettersten, PhD (Cognitive Science) – Language and cognitive development, active information-seeking and curiosity, statistical learning, word learning, big data in developmental research, infant looking time and eye-tracking methods.