Elissa Newport (University of Rochester)

Elissa Newport is the department chair and the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and was a Sloan Fellow in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Penn and MIT. She has been on the faculty at the University of California at San Diego, University of Illinois, and, since 1988, University of Rochester. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her primary research interest is in human language acquisition, with research projects including naturalistic studies of children learning their first languages, experimental studies of infants, adults, and non-human primates learning miniature languages in the lab, fieldwork on emerging sign languages, and fMRI research on language and the brain.

Elissa Newport is giving the Forum Lecture on July 15.