Welcome to SLAC (Science of Learning & Art of Communication).

The National Science Foundation has awarded our interdisciplinary group of UConn researchers a five-year grant, “The science of learning, from neurobiology to real-world application: A problem-based approach.” We aim to develop transformative models for graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, training 50 students (including 25 Ph.D. fellows).The “Science of Learning and Art of Communication,” or SLAC, draws on subfields of cognitive science and neuroscience: genetics, behavioral neuroscience, linguistics, education, psychology, and speech-language-hearing sciences. See more

We would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the territory of the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett,  Nipmuc, and Lenape Peoples, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations.  We thank them for their strength and resilience in protecting this land, and aspire to uphold our responsibilities according to their example.  From https://nacp.uconn.edu/land-acknowledgement/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome new SLAC Fellow and Associate Trainees 2022-2023

Hayes Brenner, Renee Chasse, Anne Marie Crinnion, Shawn Cummings, Sarah Gilmore, Kaya LeGrand, Jie Luo, Joselyn Perez, Jennifer Richardson, Naomi Sellers, Kristin Simmers, Susan Tilbury, Gray Thomas, & Tyler Wrenn

 

Events

  1. Mar 25 CWP Teacher-as-Writer Workshop10:00am
  2. Mar 25 Local News Job & Internship Fair on March 2510:00am
  3. Mar 27 Build Quantitative Research & Evaluation Skills Online!12:00am
  4. Mar 27 Build Quantitative Research & Evaluation Skills Online!12:00am
  5. Mar 27 CWP Summer Institutte Application Deadline12:00am
  6. Mar 27 Jane Wu: The Visionary Leadership of Minority Women in Animation5:30pm
  7. Mar 28 Neuroscience RIP Talk - Yao12:00pm
  8. Mar 28 Music Ed Master's-Info Session7:00pm
  9. Mar 29 Become a 2x UConn Alum!12:00am
  10. Mar 29 Neuroscience Journal Club - Busel12:00pm
  11. Mar 29 Graduate Student Colloquium3:30pm
  12. Mar 30 ECOM Spotlight Series: Hady Ba11:00am
  13. Mar 30 Neuroscience Seminar Series - Cowell11:00am
  14. Mar 30 The Role of Functional and Structural Brain Imaging in Educational Neuroscience 2:00pm
  15. Mar 31 Annual Logic Lecture: Maria Aloni (ILLC, Amsterdam)2:00pm
  16. Mar 31 Linguistics Colloquium4:00pm

Happenings

Congratulations to Jim Magnuson, who has been elected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to its newest class of fellows. The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.
Check out Betsy McCoach's interview for a recent episode of Science Goes to the Movies (a CUNY TV show).  The episode  “Gifted Children and Other Superheroes” is at (263) Gifted Children and other Superheroes | Science Goes to the Movies - YouTube
Congratulations to Kelly Mahaffy for receiving the 2022 BIRC Excellence Award.
Congratulations to Fumiko Hoeft, Nicole Landi, Ido Davidesco, Inge-Marie Eigsti and Jim Magnuson on a $3 Mil NSF graduate training grant. See Inside CLAS article here
Congratulations to Ido Davidesco, the first faculty member from the Neag School of Education to earn CAREER funding.
Congratulations to Oliver Lasnick who received a score at the 2nd percentile on his NIH F31 predoctoral award.  
Congratulations to Jim Magnuson for the UConn Today article on Jim's NSF-supported work on automatic speech recognition.  
Congratulations to Sahil Luthra who just received the Society for the Neurobiology of Language 2021 Dissertation Award!  He’s off for a postdoc at CMU.  More information on his work is here.
Congratulations to Fumiko Hoeft for being the winner of this year’s CLAS Innovative Scholarship Award for her blending of basic research with outreach and public engagement
Congratulations to Emily Myers for being promoted to Professor 
Congratulations to Eiling Yee for being promoted to Associate Professor with tenure
Congratulations to Stormy Chamberlain for being a keynote presenter at INSAR 2021
Congratulations to Jim Magnuson, Jay Rueckl, and Monty Escabi just received a Notice of Award from NSF for a new 3-year, $500K grant on deep learning an speech recognition.
Congratulations to Eiling Yee for being awarded funds from the President’s Commitment to Community Initiative for her proposal “Diversifying the pipeline: Potential doctoral student mentoring network.
Congratulations to Fumiko Hoeft on the award from the Tremaine Foundation to supplement her NSF grant on preventing the academic slide during COVID.
Congratulations to Fumiko Hoeft, Devin Kearns and Roeland Hancock, for their plan to move to large scale evaluation of their free app for school readiness and dyslexia screening in 4- to 8-yr-olds.  Information about the A.P.P.R.I.S.E. project is here.
Congratulations to Eiling Yee on her award from the Scholarship Facilitation Fund for research on Conceptual Convergence in the Context of COVID-19.
Congratulations to Megan Chiovaro, with her work on collective intelligence in bees (Adv: Paxton).  This was featured in UConn Today.
Congratulations to Noelle Wig, who just had her first authored paper published!  Ms. Wig’s publication is entitled “Matching the Mismatch: The interaction between perceptual and conceptual cues in bilinguals’ speech perception”.
Congratulations to Letty Naigles and Bede Agocha for the grant from CLAS to develop a new course called “Language and Racism,” which is a collaboration between the Cognitive Science program and the Africana Studies Institute.
Congratulations to Nicole Landi who received a new NIH R01 grant “Effectiveness and Predictors of Response for a Technology-based Reading Intervention in the Home,” with co-PI Mike Milham and investigators Fumiko Hoeft and Ken Pugh.
Congratulations to Alex Paxton, who with J. Dixon have an article in UConn Today, which summarizes a recent paper of theirs in PNAS (with Wim Pouw and Steven Harrison):
Congratulations to Alex Paxton who received a Scholarship Facilitation Fund award for her application “Ad hoc Efforts for Advancing Data Science Education.”
Congratulations to Fumiko Hoeft who received a $3.5M grant to the UCSF Dyslexia Center and will develop a subcontract from UCSF to UConn
Congratulations to Eiling Yee for her paper in Psychological Science - see article about it in UConn Today
Congratulations to Fumiko Hoeft for her NSF Award “Assessing and preventing the detrimental impact of literacy acquisition during COVID-19-related school closure" - see article in UConn Today
Congratulations to Stormy Chamberlain on her 3M NIH Prader-Willi grant
Congratulations to Betsy McCoach on her National Center for Research on Gifted Education grant
Congratulations to Ashley Parker on her prestigious award from the American Speech Language Hearing Foundation -- The Student Research Grant in Audiology. The title of the project is “The Inner-Ear protein Prestin as a Biomarker of Hearing Loss."

 

Check out SLAC Publications

 

 

 

Spring 2023 SLAC Courses

Courses in bold are required for current SLAC cohort, other courses are optional.

  • LING 5010 or PSYC 5500 Research Seminar in Language and Cognition, Rachel Theodore & William Snyder,  Talk-Shop, Mondays 12:20-1:10, Bous A106, 1 credit
  • PSYC 5170-002  SICSFLAGS, archive, 1 credit
  • PSYC 5170-001, Current Topics in Psychology (SLAC Practicum Seminar)
  • Outreach (1 credit) either in the fall or spring - SLAC Outreach Projects - click on this link

 

 

SLAC Brochure

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