The SSSR Nominations Committee is proud to present to you the following candidates for the SSSR Vice President position.
Becky Xi Chen
Professsor, University of Toronto
I have been engaged with SSSR for almost twenty years. I started to attend the society’s annual meetings in the early 2000s, when I was still a graduate student. I served as the society’s Executive Secretary from 2010-2015 and assisted with its daily operations. When my term ended in 2015, I was elected as a Board member for a three-year term from 2015 to 2018. During this time, I served on the awards committee and the membership committee. I enjoy organizing conferences and events and have organized several international conferences and workshops. These events brought people together and generated new ideas for research and practice. I hope to be able to use my skills to serve SSSR in the role of vice president.
I am a professor in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at OISE/University of Toronto. My research examines the language and literacy development of bilingual children. I have studied children from diverse linguistic backgrounds (e.g., English-French, Dutch-English, Arabic-English, and Chinese-English) and educational programs (e.g., French immersion in Canada vs. English immersion in the Netherlands and China). In recent years, my research has also explored how to increase the accuracy of early screening of reading difficulties in bilingual and multilingual populations. I have been a co-editor-in-chief for Annals of Dyslexia since 2017.
Laurie Cutting
Professor, Vanderbilt University
I am pleased to be nominated for Vice President of SSSR. I have been involved with SSSR since 1997, when I was a post-doctoral fellow and presented my dissertation findings at SSSR’s conference in San Diego that year, and then transitioned to a voting member once I attained a faculty position. Throughout the years, SSSR has become my most treasured conference – if I am able to attend only one conference, I choose SSSR because it not only presents cutting edge basic research on reading and literacy, but also includes researchers from different disciplines from around the world. Having an international, interdisciplinary research perspective on reading and literacy has substantially shaped my approach to research.
My literacy research has long focused on the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and education, and, recently, intervention work. I have projects that are examining neurobiological predictors of reading growth, measurement of text difficulty, and responsiveness to instruction, along with related topics such as the influence of socioeconomic status on reading development. Currently, I am the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Special Education, Psychology, Pediatrics, and Radiology at Vanderbilt University, as well as the Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center (VKC). I have had many different leadership positions during my (almost) 23 years as a faculty member both in and outside of Vanderbilt (and, prior to that, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine/Kennedy Krieger Institute). In most recent role as the Associate Director of the VKC, I am responsible for helping to direct not only the scientific vision of the center, but also coordinating across various stakeholders, to include researchers that span from basic to applied/interventional research to policy makers. Thus, I am well versed in working with scientists from multiple disciplines and backgrounds. I am dedicated to SSSR’s mission to “promote the scientific study of reading and to disseminate information about reading and related areas such as language and literacy” and would welcome the opportunity to apply my leadership experience to furthering the goals of SSSR.