Investigators

Portrait of Laura J. Mattie, PhD

Laura J. Mattie, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Speech and Hearing Science, Principal Investigator of the DND Lab

Dr. Laura Mattie (formerly Hahn) joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. Dr. Mattie received her Ph.D. in Education and Human Development from Colorado State University in 2012, where she served as project and lab coordinator for the CSU Developmental Disabilities Research Lab. Following her Ph.D., she spent 2 years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Life Span Institute at the University of Kansas funded under an NRSA Postdoctoral Training grant from the NIH (T32, NICHD) in Translational Research in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, where she worked on the Family Adaptation to Fragile X project. She also completed a 1-year post-doctoral fellowship with the Neurodevelopmental Disorders Project at the University of South Carolina.

Dr. Mattie’s research focuses on characterizing the emerging communicative and social phenotypes of individuals with neurogenetic disabilities, and the potential cascading effects of early developmental strengths and weaknesses on later outcomes. The aim of her research is to elucidate early developmental patterns and document the developmental trajectory of skills that improve communication outcomes for individuals with neurogenetic disabilities. This will lead to the identification of treatment targets and strategies for early intervention, which will promote well-being and positive development.

Portrait of Pamela Hadley, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Pamela Hadley, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Professor of Speech and Hearing Science, Director of the Applied Psycholinguistics Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Pamela Hadley has been a Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on five past or current federally-funded projects characterizing longitudinal language growth and language input to young children with and without specific language impairment/developmental language disorder. The new collaborative projects with Dr. Mattie will provide the opportunity to examine language growth in an earlier developmental period and in new populations and the influences of child and maternal gesture on language input and word learning.


Picture of Marie Channell

Marie Channell, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Speech and Hearing Science, Principal Investigator of the Intellectual DisAbilities Communication Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Marie Channell’s research aims to better understand how individuals with Down syndrome and intellectual disability learn to communicate. The long-term goal is to characterize the development of everyday communication skills in order to identify optimal strategies for supporting social and academic success. The new collaborative project with Dr. Mattie seeks to understand how best to apply autism screening tools and other developmental measures to children with Down syndrome.