Anastasia Stoops, Ph.D.

I am a fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and  a postdoctoral researcher at the Learning and Language Lab in the Psychology Department  at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I am an educational psychologist interested in the role of nature and nurture on thought, language and literacy development over the life span. To investigate this broad question, I pursue two lines of inquiry. First is online and laboratory-based psychophysics and psycholinguistic experiments with eye-tracking and electroencephalographic recordings (co-registered and stand alone). Second is computational analyses of naturalistic environments (e.g. human interactions “in the wild”). My work is supported by federal agencies (NIH, NSF) and private donors (Facebook, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Foundation).

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where my doctoral research was done at the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab at the Department of Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning Program. In addition, I completed a  three-year NIH-funded clinical postdoctoral traineeship with a double appointment at the Division of Experimental Therapeutics in the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University, NY and the Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, (Orangeburg NY) consistently ranked among top 30 (top 1%)  neuroscience research institutions world-wide and a research hub for the neuroscientists in the NY Metro area.