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Research conducted by CHD affiliated faculty

On Campus Research Opportunities
Project in Cognitive & Neural Development, Doris Trauner, Director
Also includes CHD affiliated faculty Mark Appelbaum, Ursula Bellugi, Debbie Mills, Joan Stiles, and Doris Trauner cross-disciplinary team of researchers studying language and cognitive development in typically developing children and children with a range of clinical diagnoses (including children with early focal brain injury, children whose parents have language impairments, and children classified as late talkers).

Center for Research in Language, Jeff Elman, co-director
Interdisciplinary research group (cognitive science, computer science, communication disorders, developmental psychology, linguistics, neurosciences, communication, pediatrics and psycholinguistics), investigating the nature of language, the processes by which it is acquired and used, and the mediation of language in the human brain.

Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, Ursula Bellugi
Current projects include: Bridging Cognition Brain and Gene: Evidence from Williams Syndrome, Brain Organization: Clues from Sign Aphasia.

Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition, Michael Cole
characterizing the development of children and the development of the social institutions in which they are developing; applications of technology in education

Cognitive Development Laboratory, Gedeon Deak
cognitive and language development in preschool children, with a primary focus on cognitive flexibility

Development of Visual Perception in Human Infants, Karen Dobkins
exploring the link between neural function and visual perception (specifically visual motion and color processing) using perceptual experiments; developmentally-oriented studies of motion and color processing (infants through adults); fMRI studies of deaf and hearing individuals; nerve physiology in primates.

Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, studies of ASL, Karen Emmorey
Language processing in adults; sign language and neural representation of language; the relation between language and spatial cognition; the determinants of brain organization for language

Social-Cognitive Development Laboratory, Gail Heyman
the development of children's folk beliefs about the self and others; the causes and consequences of children's beliefs about people, and their implications for achievement motivation and self-understanding; the types of inferences children make when they are learning new information about people versus non-human entities.

CREATE, Bud Mehan & Olga Vasquez
Research foci: 1. Forming partnerships between UCSD and local elementary and secondary schools 2. UCSD's on-campus model school: The Preuss School 3. Evaluation of CREATE's partnerships, model school, outreach efforts; faculty research efforts in areas such as the achievement of high academic standards, the best practices for educating underrepresented students, and closing the achievement gap among socioeconomically diverse students) 4. Innovative teacher education and professional development opportunities for local educators and administrators.

Brain & Cognitive Development Laboratory, Debra Mills
Electrophysiological studies of language and non-language cognitive development in normally developing infants and children from 3-months through adolescence, and in special populations of infants and children including: bilingual children, children classified as late talkers, children whose parents have language impairments, infants and children with focal brain injury, individuals with Williams and Down Syndromes.

Biological Anthropology Laboratory, Jim Moore
"The evolution of the culture-bearing capacity": Fieldwork on chimpanzee ecology in western Tanzania; use of comparative behavioral data on temperament in nonhuman primates to clarify proximate mechanisms involved with the evolution of social systems

Language & Literacy Project, Carol Padden
Symbolic development in young children; the interplay of child development and cultural institutions; the development of orthographic awareness in young deaf children, different trajectories of reading development across minority children; how popular notions of culture are translated into classrooms as schools struggle with the ideals of integration; application of research to the classroom.

Autism Research Program, Laura Schreibman
Applied behavior analysis, specifically behavior modification, experimental psychopathology in children, developmental disabilities (particularly childhood autism), generalization and maintenance of acquired behavior change, and discrimination learning

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Joan Stiles
development of a variety of spatial-cognitive abilities including part-whole processing, spatial localization, mental rotation, and mental image generation; involves both normally developing children and children who have had peri- or prenatal strokes; use of behavioral tasks and functional MRI (fMRI)

Off-Campus Research Opportunities
Division of Community Pediatrics, Phil Nader
Health-related research with youth and family, current projects include: CATCH, an intervention to change nutritional/physical activity habits from childhood to adolescence Clearview: developing curriculum for distance learning in schools, currently focused on nutrition and physical activity.

Center for Community Health, Phil Nader, Judi Lopez-Larsen
Works as a link between university and community

Research-Based Outreach & Training Programs
CREATE's "Cluster" school projects
These projects are focused on enriching the educational environments of several San Diego school "clusters" (including elementary schools, feeder middle schools, and their high schools) that have historically been educationally underserved. Research by current core faculty extends beyond the classroom to a wide variety of community centers serving children and youth (e.g., Head Start, Boys & Girls Clubs, school-based after school programs), as well as local community colleges which are potentially important links in the educational pipeline we are seeking to establish between underserved communities and UC.

CREATE's Assessment of summer educational enrichment programs
Such programs have been designed to counter the significant drop over the summer break in student academic skills that is most pronounced among low SES children. It is of critical importance to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs and develop ways of improving them

The Preuss School
In September of 1999, UCSD initiated a charter combined middle-high school on the UCSD campus designed to serve children from families whose members have never had the opportunity to attend an institution of higher learning. The diverse student body of this school and the opportunity for UCSD students and faculty to participate in its development provides obviously unique research opportunities of many kinds.

Visualizing Earth, Paula Levin
In collaboration with the Cal Space Institute and an interdisciplinary team at UCSD, this project seeks to assess the effects of augmenting earth science lessons with images of earth taken from space, promoting fundamental research in cognition and visualization, adapting complex technology and data sources for ease of use in schools, developing model curriculum at the middle school level to support cognition and visualization research, and supporting the implementation of national education standards in science, math and geography

The "Normal Heights Kids" newspaper project, Ellen Seiter
Evaluate the impact of participation in a newspaper production program on literacy skills; assess children's attitudes towards and mastery of the new technologies featured in the program

La Clase Magica Project, Olga Vasquez
An after-school computer club serving bilingual participants aged 3-52; uses a lifespan approach to study methods and content that enhance K-12 achievement, minority representation in higher education, and access to mainstream institutions.

Algebraic Thinking Institute (ATI)
The Mission of the Algebraic Thinking Institute (ATI) is to help all the participants deepen their understanding of the basic constructs of algebraic thinking and develop classroom techniques that foster such understanding in students.

California History - Social Science Project (CHSSP)
The California History-Social Science Project at UCSD provides professional development programs to K-12 teachers of San Diego County. The Project currently offers two kinds of programs: selection summer institutes (open to all teachers through an application process), and partnership programs with whole school faculties (elementary) or history/social science departments (secondary).

Principals Executive Program
This program, designed for already outstanding and motivated school leaders (K-12, public and private), is intended to be experiential, purposeful and team-centered. The eight monthly seminars are structured to provide significant time for critical reflection, planning, and action with colleagues from other schools, non-profit and government organizations, local businesses, and other critical stake-holders from a school's local community.