PEN Distinguished Lecture Series
The PEN Distinguished Lecture Series in Educational Neuroscience was created in association with the Foundations Proseminar course for graduate students in the Ph.D. in Educational Neuroscience (PEN) program. Since its inception, the series has grown!
The lecture series focuses on the intersection of the Science of Learning (learning across the lifespan) and Educational Neuroscience (learning across early life). Scientists and researchers who are pioneers in the fields of Cognitive-Educational Neuroscience, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and Child Development come to Gallaudet University's campus to talk about their research.
Register for Upcoming Lectures
All lectures are open to the public and are video recorded for online distribution.
PEN DLS brochure for 2024-2025
Educational Neuroscience of Reading Development
Functional and structural neuroimaging studies of adult readers have provided a deeper understanding of the neural basis of reading, yet such findings also open new questions about how developing neural systems come to support this learned ability. A developmental cognitive neuroscience approach provides insights into how skilled reading emerges in the developing brain, yet also raises new methodological challenges. This talk focuses on functional changes that occur during reading acquisition in cortical regions associated with both the perception of visual words and spoken language, and examines how such functional changes differ within developmental reading disabilities. I will integrate these findings within an interactive specialization framework of functional development, and propose that such a framework may provide insights into how individual differences at several levels of observation (genetics, white matter tract structure, functional organization of language, cultural organization of writing systems) may impact the emergence of neural systems involved in reading ability and disability.