Plenary Speakers
Hosted by
FACULTY OF HEALTH PROFESSIONS
School of Human Communication Disorders
We are delighted to have the following plenary speakers for the conference in 2016:
Ellen Bialystok, PhD (York University)
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Ellen Bialystok, PhD (York University)Ellen Bialystok is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She obtained her PhD in 1976 from the University of Toronto specializing in cognitive and language development in children. Her current research focuses on the effect of bilingualism on language and cognition across the lifespan showing modification in cognitive systems from this experience. Her research uses both behavioral and neuroimaging methods and examines participants who are children, younger or older adults, as well as patients. She has published extensively in the form of books, scientific articles, and book chapters. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and among her awards are the Canadian Society for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science Hebb Award (2011), Killam Prize for the Social Sciences (2010), York University President’s Research Award of Merit (2009), Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence at the Baycrest Geriatric Centre (2005), Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research (2002), Killam Research Fellowship (2001), and the Walter Gordon Research Fellowship (1999). |
Ingrid Johnsrude, PhD (Western University)
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Ingrid Johnsrude, PhD (Western University)Ingrid Johnsrude obtained a BSc from Queen’s University and a PhD in clinical psychology (neuropsychology) from McGill University in 1997, where her supervisor was Prof. Brenda Milner. Following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at University College London (UK), she was recruited to the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge (UK). In 2004 she moved (back) to Queen’s University, where she was appointed Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Cognitive Neuroscience and established the Cognitive Neuroscience of Communication and Hearing (CoNCH) lab. She and her lab moved to Western University in 2014, where she is now Western Research Chair and full professor. Ingrid and her trainees use behavioural and neuroimaging methods to study the processes by which acoustic information in sound is transformed in the brain into meaningful language, in both young and older individuals. In 2009 she received the prestigious E.W.R Steacie Memorial Fellowship from NSERC. She has authored or co-authored 97 published peer-reviewed research articles, 1 textbook, 2 encyclopedia entries, and 11 book chapters. She has an h-index of 35, and her research contributions have been cited over 9,000 times. |
Sally Rice, PhD (University of Alberta)
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Sally Rice, PhD (University of Alberta)Sally Rice is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta. Her research and publication record span multiple sub-disciplines, including lexical semantics, comparative Athapaskan, endangered language pedagogy, corpus linguistics, and multimodality in language. She teaches in the areas of syntax/semantics, language documentation, and cognitive linguistics. She conducts fieldwork on Dene Sųłiné and Tsuut’ina, two northern Athapaskan languages spoken in Alberta, and has been an active proponent and practitioner of community-university research alliances. To that end, she was a co-founder in 2001 of the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI), an annual summer school for speakers of indigenous languages that trains community language activists in linguistic analysis, language pedagogy, and revitalization project development and advocacy. In 2007, she developed a provincially accredited Community Linguist Certificate, which has now seen nearly 100 graduates from across Canada. She has had the privilege of teaching and learning from speakers of over 25 indigenous languages of North America. |
Janet F. Werker, PhD (University of British Columbia)
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Janet F. Werker, PhD (University of British Columbia)Dr. Janet F. Werker is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Werker is internationally recognized for her research investigating the perceptual foundations of language acquisition in both monolingual and bilingual learning infants. Her over 150 papers and chapters, have appeared in prestigious journals including Science, Nature, Nature Communications, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Neuroscience, Psychological Science, and Cognition as well as in the premier journals in developmental psychology, language, and perception. Her awards include, the Killam Research Prize, the UBC Alumni Prize in Social Sciences, the Jacob Bieley Prize (UBC’s premier research prize), and the Anne L. Brown Award in Developmental Psychology. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research, the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Psychological Association, The American Psychological Society, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research is funded by NSERC, SSHRC, and CIFAR in Canada, and by the NIH in the U.S. Previous funding sources include the Human Frontiers Science Program, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and NTT Laboratories. |