VL2 graduate students and esteemed neuroscientist honored with Gallaudet University awards

Two Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) graduate students and an esteemed collaborating professor of Gallaudet University’s Ph.D. in Educational Neuroscience (PEN) program were honored for their research and professional contributions during the University’s Graduate Awards and Hooding Ceremony.

Adam Stone, Dr. Laura-Ann Petitto’s doctoral student in Gallaudet University’s Ph.D. in Educational Neuroscience (PEN) program and a graduate research assistant in Dr. Petitto’s Brain & Language Laboratory for Neuroimaging (BL2), was honored with two awards at the 2017 Graduate Awards and Hooding Ceremony.

Adam is the first recipient of the University’s new Ph.D. in Educational Neuroscience Outstanding Research Award.  Adam has consistently demonstrated outstanding scholarly productivity and has achieved national and international visibility as a researcher and scholar in educational neuroscience. Adam has published multiple, peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals and also won the prestigious National Institutes of Health “F31” fellowship, one of two students to receive this award in Gallaudet’s history. The awardee also has presented at scientific conferences around the world.

In addition to Adam’s PEN award, he has been awarded the University’s Graduate Student Research/Writing Award, which is bestowed to graduate students who completed an outstanding research document in their academic program.

Dr. Guinevere Eden is the recipient of the University’s Outstanding Collaboration Award. The entire PEN faculty; including Dr. Petitto and VL2 Center co-principal investigator, Dr. Thomas Allen; nominated Dr. Eden for the honor due to her exemplary work with the PEN program.

In Dr. Eden’s role as a collaborator of the PEN program, she has taught essential courses in research methods, worked closely with PEN students in preparation for their qualifying exams, and served as a mentor in PEN’s Summer Lab Rotation in cognitive neuroscience.

Dr. Eden is an internationally-renowned cognitive neuroscientist in the fields of autism and dyslexia, a full professor in the Department of Pediatrics, and the director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. There, she and her colleagues use modern brain imaging techniques to advance new knowledge about the nature of reading that has important implications for all children, including deaf and hard of hearing children.

VL2 honors Adam and Dr. Eden for their contributions to science and to the intellectual vitality of the PEN program.

In addition, VL2 congratulates Phoebe Tay, a graduate assistant in the VL2 Early Education Literacy Lab (EL2). Like Adam, Phoebe is also the recipient of the Graduate Student Research/Writing Award, for her ethnographic study of Singaporean culture. Phoebe’s research helped shape her work in EL2, which conducts studies of individual differences among deaf children in their literacy development in authentic early education settings.