Our Team

Prior to joining the Yale Child Study Center, Dr. Aslin was a Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories from 2017-2023, and prior to Haskins, Dr. Aslin was on the faculty at the University of Rochester for 33 years, where he established the Rochester Baby Lab. Dr. Aslin’s work focuses on perceptual and motor systems, language acquisition, and statistical learning. His work on statistical learning showed that infants can understand structure from rapid streams of speech or images by simple exposure. More recent work has shown that infants direct their attention to auditory and visual cues that have an intermediate level of complexity. Dr. Aslin primarily focuses on studies utilizing fMRI, EEG, and fNIRS. Dr. Aslin has been the recipient of several major awards, including the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award (2014) and the APS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement (2015), and several honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the National Academy of Sciences (2013). In his spare time, Dr. Aslin enjoys cycling and completes at least one multi-day ride each year in the Rocky mountains or the French alps.

Prior to joining Yale, Aditya obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of Cambridge (2017), graduating with a First Class degree with Distinction. His final Analysis Portfolio explored two-dimensional sonata form in Respighi’s Quartetto Dorico, and the value of neo-Riemannian theory in explaining transition passages in Chausson’s Poème. He also holds a Masters degree from Stanford University in Music, Science, and Technology (2019). At Stanford, he taught introductory computer science, and worked in the Neuromusic Lab at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where his research examined the neural correlates of piano duet improvisation using EEG, and violinists’ expressive gesture profiles using motion capture technology. Aditya’s primary research interests include the embodiment of musical structure, and the perception of familiar melodic schemata in galant music. When he is not busy gelling subjects’ scalps for EEG experiments or taping reflective markers to performers for motion capture experiments, Aditya is an avid violinist. He was a winner of the Cambridge University Symphony Orchestra concerto competition in 2015, and the Stanford Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition in 2018.

How do people learn language in the face of its vast complexity? My research shows how domain-general cognitive mechanisms can explain many sophisticated linguistic behaviors, from word learning to sentence processing in both the spoken and written modalities. My NSF GRFP-funded dissertation work at Cornell University focused on how individual differences in statistical learning and memory predict spoken language skills in adults, and on developing improved methods of testing these phenomena. This work was awarded the Cognitive Science Society’s Glushko Dissertation Prize in 2023. My work as an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the LLAMB Lab at Yale University expanded these findings, investigating how individual differences in statistical learning fundamentally shape reading development in pre- and early literate children. Most recently, I have been awarded a K99 Pathway to Independence grant by the NIH, where I am using EEG frequency tagging to uncover neural markers of implicit statistical learning in children and establish how these markers predict readiness to read in pre-literate children.

Dr. Lewkowicz is a Senior Research Scientist in the Yale Child Study Center. He received his BA from Brandeis University and his PhD from the City University of New York and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in child mental health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. He is a former President of the International Congress on Infant Studies and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Lewkowicz investigates perceptual and cognitive development in infancy and early childhood, with two primary foci: the development of multisensory perception and attention and the development of pattern/sequence learning. The ultimate aim of Lewkowicz's research program is to gain insights into the acquisition of speech, language, and social skills and the ways that specific early experience contributes to their emergence. A current specific focus of the research in Lewkowicz's lab is two-fold. The first is the developmental emergence of the perceptual and attentional mechanisms needed to solve what has come to be known as the multisensory cocktail party problem (MCPP). The MCPP arises whenever we are confronted with multiple interlocutors and must rapidly integrate corresponding face-voice pairs and then perceptually segregate them into unique individuals to communicate successfully with any one of them. The second current focus is on the development of multisensory attention to audiovisual speech and its integration in developmentally typical as well as in infants and young children at risk for developmental disabilities (e.g., autism). Lewkowicz has published widely in the psychological literature including developmental psychology and psychobiology.

My research, broadly defined, evaluates how very young children learn and comprehend spoken words. I utilize psycholinguistic methods such as the visual world paradigm and eye-tracking to better understand how infants and toddlers process the acoustic-phonetic detail in the speech signal. My work translates basic science procedures to clinical populations, including toddlers with language delay, in order to develop more sensitive metrics for diagnosing and treating childhood language impairments.

Dr. Sara Sanchez-Alonso is an Associate Research Scientist at the Child Study Center. She specializes in language neurodevelopment and multi-modal imaging (fMRI-fNIRS). Dr. Sanchez-Alonso received a Master of Science in speech and language pathology funded by an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters scholarship from the European Commission. Subsequently, she completed post-baccalaureate research training in Dr. Angela Friederici's lab at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, where she trained in psychology and neurobiology of language. During her postdoctoral training, Dr. Sanchez-Alonso worked with Dr. Richard Aslin at Haskins Laboratories and implemented the first fMRI/fNIRS integrated data collection effort at the Yale Brain Imaging Center. She joined the Yale Child Study Center as research faculty in 2023.

Tristan is interested in how the brain networks that support learning and memory change across development, influencing the types of memories we retain, the inferences we draw, and our abstract knowledge of the world. Tristan has always been fascinated with how both biology and culture contribute to human behavior, thanks in part to her fraternal twin sister.

Vanya Shivashankar is an undergraduate student in Yale College majoring in Cognitive Science. She is also a Global Health Scholar through the GHS MAP in affiliation with the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research interests surround global mental health, education equity, and behavioral insights in LMICs. She currently works in Dr. Ashley Hagaman’s Innovation Lab for Qualitative Methods and Global Health on a project involving postpartum depression in mothers and its relationship to sleep. Vanya is also part of Dr. Saad Omer’s research group to study behavioral insights and responses to vaccine distributions during COVID-19.  She is interested in the studying more about global mental health and apply this research to a future career in medicine.

Dr. Bayet is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist interested in infant cognitive development and high-level vision. Her lab combines electro-encephalography (EEG), behavioral methods, and computational tools to uncover how infants and young children learn to interpret complex visual objects relevant to affective, social communication. To that end, the lab has a particular focus on the rich, clinically relevant, and well-described case of affective facial expression perception and understanding. Dr. Bayet's work has been recognized with a Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and a Distinguished Early Career Contribution Award from the International Congress of Infant Studies.

Professor Chawarska has received her clinical and research training at Yale. She is a leading expert in research on identifying early diagnostic markers and novel treatment targets in autism spectrum disorders (ASD).  She leads the NIH Autism Center of Excellence at the Yale Child Study Center.  In her clinical practice, Dr. Chawarska specializes in early diagnosis of ASD as well as developmental follow-up of infants at risk for ASD due to familial factors (e.g., having an older sibling with ASD), genetic factors (e.g., having a syndrome related to ASD such as Fragile X), or due to prenatal or perinatal complications such as premature birth.

Dr. Lauren Emberson (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. At UBC, Dr. Emberson’s lab is a part of the Early Development Research Group, a consortium of several research centers interested in the development of perception, language, learning, and social understanding in infants and children. Prior to UBC, Dr. Emberson was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University where she co-founded and co-directs the Princeton Baby and Princeton Kid Labs: a developmental group comprising several research labs.

My research focuses on how structured visual information is acquired and converted into sophisticated internal representations for controlling cognition and behavior. We use an integrated approach with three main components: human psychophysical and learning experiments, computational modeling of perception and learning, and multi-electrode recording from behaving animals. Our research topics include formation of hierarchical object representations, active learning and meta-lerning, teaching, complex decision making, probabilistic computation in the brain, and the link between beliefs and knowledge. The overarching theme of our work is pursuing a statistically based and biologically sound framework to link low-level visual processes and mechanisms (e.g., orientation coding and adaptation) with the development and learning of higher level complex features and constancies for efficient representations of objects and scenes that allows intelligent interaction with the environment.

Prof. Bob McMurray is the director of the Mechanisms of Audio-visual Categorization LAB (MACLab). He's a member of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences with appointments in Linguistics, Communication Sciences and Disorders, and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Iowa.

Charles A. Nelson, III, PhD is currently Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds the Richard David Scott Chair in Pediatric Developmental Medicine Research at Boston Children’s Hospital and serves as Director of Research in the Division of Developmental Medicine.

Dr. Newport has been recognized by a number of organizations for the impact of her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of language acquisition. She has been elected as a fellow in the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation, and the Packard Foundation. In 2015 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.

My interests are focused on the cognitive mechanisms and factors involved in language acquisition. My research explores different aspects of speech perception from birth to the production of the first words. I am interested in exploring the role of experience as well as the perceptual reorganization observed during the first year of life. My current research examines infant’s ability to perceive the relationship between the auditory and visual speech, as well as the mechanisms involved in these processes.

Monica Rosenberg joined the faculty as a Assistant Professor in 2019. Her research explores how we pay attention, and how insights from attention research can help improve focus. Dr. Rosenberg completed her PhD and postdoctoral work in the Department of Psychology at Yale University after earning her undergraduate degree in cognitive neuroscience at Brown University. A primary focus of Dr. Rosenberg’s work has been what we can learn about a person from their unique patterns of brain activity, and what this can tell us about the nature of the brain and mind. In particular, she builds models that predict individual differences in attention and cognition from functional brain connectivity. This work has revealed, for example, that data collected while a person is simply resting in an MRI scanner (and not completing any task at all) can be used predict aspects of their behavior, including how well they pay attention and remember information. Dr. Rosenberg’s work also uses functional MRI, behavioral experiments, and machine learning methods to investigate how attention fluctuates over time, changes across development, and interacts with the rest of the mind.

Professor Mark Schmuckler earned his Ph.D. in Psychology, focusing on both music cognition and infant development, at Cornell University. Upon completion of his doctorate in 1988, he began a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia. Professor Schmuckler is a specialist in the areas of infant perceptual-action coupling and the perception of pitch structure in music. He has authored and contributed to a number of texts, including The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology and The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology.

My research explores language learning, bilingualism, and how the brain represents linguistic categories. I use many behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods in this work. Please visit my Research page for more details. This work spans many collaborating neuroimaging labs (fNIRS, fMRI, EEG), where we are pioneering the latest in multimodal neuroscience and psycholinguistic methods.