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. Additionally, in collaboration with a group of second language aquistion/bilingual language development reasearchers, she developed a new free self-scoring language proficiency test for bilingual speakers and second language learners of Russian. During her previous postdoctoral position in clinical psychology, she examined the neural bases of reading dysfunction in schizophrenia.

Currently, she is a researcher at the Learning and Language Lab in the Pscyhology Department and a research affiliate in the Center for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovations at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). She investigates reading development from three perspectives:

1. Computational analyses of naturalistic environments that support literacy developement i.e. human interactions "in the wild" (e.g. caregiver-child interactions during picture book reading at home)
2. Experimental (online and lab-based: eye-tracking and EEG) investigations of text exposure as a key source of linguistic input for language development
3. Computational modeling of visual and linguistic factors that modulate eye movements in skilled and developing readers