April A Benasich

Dr. Benasich is the Elizabeth H. Solomon Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. She is also the Director of the Infancy Studies Laboratory at the Center for Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN), the Director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research, and a Principal Investigator within the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center headquartered at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Benasich received her Ph.D.s from New York University in Experimental/Cog Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology (1987). Postdoctoral work was completed at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, MD as a member of the Research Steering Committee of the Infant Health and Development Program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A second postdoctoral fellowship was conducted under the guidance of Dr. Paula Tallal at the CMBN where her research on the speed of information processing in the visual system and the contribution of intermodal and cross-modal processing to early cognitive development broadened to include rapid auditory processing profiles in young infants. Her findings are groundbreaking, as she has demonstrated for the first time that the ability to perform fine non-speech acoustic discriminations in early infancy is critically important to and highly predictive of later language development in normally developing children as well as children at risk for language disorders. These data further suggest that measures of rapid auditory processing ability may be used to identify and importantly, remediate infants at highest risk of language delay and impairment regardless of risk status.