Anastasia Stoops

After receiving  Ph.D. in the Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning Division at the Department of Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Stoops completed a  three-year NIH-funded clinical postdoctoral traineeship with a double appointment in the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University, NY and the Schizophrenia Program at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (Orangeburg NY).  For her dissertation, she found that skilled readers process linguistic information earlier and more quickly in the visual system than previously thought. After graduation,  in collaboration with the faculty members from the Intensive English Institute (IEI), she developed a new approach of teaching critical thinking skills for the beginning writers. During her previous postdoctoral position in clinical psychology, she examined the neural bases of reading dysfunction in schizophrenia.

Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Learning and Language Lab in the Pscyhology Department and a fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). She investigates reading development from two perspectives:

1. Experimental and corpus analyses of text exposure as a key source of linguistic input for language development
2. Computational modeling of visual and linguistic factors that predict eye movements in skilled and unskilled readers