Bruce McCandliss Joins LSI

topics: Psychology and Human Development

LSI Press Release

Bruce McCandliss (PhD University of Oregon, 1997) joined the Peabody College faculty in January as the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Psychology and Human Development.

After completing his PhD. in Psychology with a focus in electrophysiology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon, he completed his post-doctoral training in fMRI of reading and language development at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint program between Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. In 1999, McCandliss began an assistant professorship at the Weill Cornell Medical College, at the same time joining Michael Posner, PhD, and BJ Casey, PhD, in founding the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology.

McCandliss received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government for outstanding scientists and engineers in the early part of their independent research careers. Granted to him at a ceremony at the White House on Nov. 1, the award recognizes McCandliss' research into the biological basis for language development and dysfunction in developmental disorders such as dyslexia. Using insights of cognitive neuroscience, including brain imaging, he has helped develop methods to alleviate reading disabilities.

McCandliss is the co-founder of Reading Works, a computer program he uses to help New York City public elementary school students who are struggling with basic reading skills. This program uses computer technology to teach reading skills based on insights from cognitive neuroscience research. Children involved in the program, which encompasses 20 40-minute sessions over a period of several months, demonstrate average improvements of 1.2 grade levels in reading skills.

His current research continues to focus on drawing connections between investigations of the development of brain structure, brain function, the emergence of foundational skills that develop significantly during early elementary school, such as reading, mathematics and attention. This research focuses on not only development in the sense of maturation, but also on experience dependent changes that may be driven specifically by education. This research is grounded in basic questions regarding brain plasticity, functional reorganization, and age-related changes in learning linked to 'sensitive period' effects, and employs brain imaging methods such as fMRI task contrasts and adaptation paradigms, high-density ERP recordings, and anatomical measurements of white matter tract microstructure using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). This work is also informed by studies of atypical development in brain function and structure that characterize language-related disabilities, such as developmental dyslexia. These basic and applied research projects are combined with translational projects that attempt to leverage insights from brain imaging of typical and atypical reading development to improve reading interventions for children, as well as to study the impact of learning within such interventions on changes in functional brain activity.

Bruce has several NIH funded projects now at Vanderbilt.