Laurie Cutting in her lab.
Photo: Harrison McClary/Vanderbilt University
EBRL is proud to report that Dr. Laurie Cutting has been named the 2025 SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner. The annual award honors faculty members from across all the 16 SEC universities for dedication to advancing academic excellence through teaching, innovation, and service.
EBRL’s Natalie Huerta is a recipient of the 2025 Robert Gaylord-Ross Award, a Peabody Special Education Department award for excellence in scholarly writing by a doctoral student. We’re happy to see her being recognized for her hard work, particularly for her scholarly writing! The award was established in 1995 in memory of Dr. Robert Gaylord-Ross an outstanding researcher in the Department of Special Education. It’s presented annually to a doctoral student in the Graduate School or Peabody College who is the sole or fist author of the most distinguished scholarly paper.
Dr. Amanda Martinez-Lincoln was awarded an NIH/NICHD Research Career Development Award. Her K99/R00 will examine the role of executive function during reading and math in children. Learn more about her project at this link: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/v37q1ibXgECjrSnxEy39ag/project-details/10807195#similar-Projects
At Vanderbilt, collaboration between the different colleges is a top priority. The university recognizes that some of the world’s most pressing problems won’t have a solution unless we pool our knowledge together. To that end, the graduate school offers the prestigious Lacy-Fischer Interdisciplinary Research Grants. These grants enable teams across fields to bridge the gap between the disciplines and add to their respective fields. EBRL’s own Emily Harriott has been awarded one of the grants for her and her collaborator Harrison Parent combining the fields of neuroscience and pharmacology to further examine children with Neurofibromatosis Type 1.
If you’d like to find out more about Vanderbilt’s push for interdisciplinary research, learn more here:
https://gradschool.vanderbilt.edu/funding/internal-funding-opportunities/
The National Science Foundation has a long history of investing in students with demonstrated potential for significant achievements in science and engineering. This year, EBRL’s own Emily Harriott was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship from their Developmental Psychology division. About 12,000 students apply annually for the fellowship across the United States and only about 2,000 receive awards, making it an intensely competitive award. An honor so rare, in fact, that Emily holds the honor for being the first student from EBRL to receive it!
The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support taking into account an annual stipend of $37,000. According to the National Science Foundation, forty of the past beneficiaries have gone on to become Nobel laureates, and more than 440 have become members of the National Academy of Sciences. If you’d like to find out more about the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, see their website at this link or read about the history of the fellowship here.
Each year, hundreds of students and academics from across Vanderbilt pull together and present their research during a sweeping day of science and research. This year’s VKC Science Day held the distinction of being the first time the event was held in person since 2019. More than 100 presenters demonstrated their work across two consecutive poster sessions while judges roamed and assessed their presentations.
During VKC Science Day EBRL’s own Andrea Burgess won the Poster Competition under the Systems Neuroscience category with her poster: “Executive function-related neural activity and connectivity during word reading predict later reading ability”
Find out more at Vanderbilt Kennedy Center’s news covering the event here.
Find out more about VKC Science Day here.
The AIM Institute for Learning & Research annual Research to Practice Symposium is a free, day-long event that brings together literacy researchers and educators to learn and collaborate on important literacy themes. This year’s event, which will take place in-person as well as be accessible to a global audience via live stream, will focus on the complexity of reading comprehension and provide educators with insights for the classroom. The presentations will be moderated by Nancy Hennessy, author of The Reading Comprehension Blueprint. The event will also include presentations by Dr. Hugh Catts, Director of FSU School of Communication Science and Disorders at the Florida Center for Reading & Research, Dr. Amy Elleman, Director of the Literacy Studies Ph.D program at Middle Tennessee State University, and Dr. Tiffany Hogan, Director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions.
Dr. Cutting will receive the Hollis Scarborough Award and make remarks during the event. Past Hollis Scarborough Award recipients include Dr. Hollis Scarborough (who received the inaugural award in 2019), Dr. Linnea Ehri, Dr. Mark Seidenberg, and Dr. Don Compton.
Register to attend the 2023 symposium at: www.aimpa.org/symposium.
In recognition for her continued contributions and labor for Vanderbilt’s research and staff, Dr. Laurie Cutting was honored this year to be awarded the Peabody College Distinguished Faculty Colleague Award for 2021-2022. Receiving this award is an exceptional honor, yet there is always more to do. Research isn’t something you can hold or touch with your hands, but a horizon to strive for. And so, the work continues.
Andrea Burgess, third-year graduate student in the lab, received funding for ReproNim/INCF Training Fellowship Program, sponsored jointly by ReproNim and the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF). This is a full year Train-the-Trainer fellowship program which provides Fellows with conceptual and practical training in reproducible neuroimaging, as well as tailored support for individual syllabus development and implementation of reproducibility training back home at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. She is excited to take what she learns from this program to help improve neuroimaging practices at Vanderbilt!
To find out more about this fellowship, click here.
Join us in congratulating EBRL’s Dr. Katherine Aboud in receiving the Director’s Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health! The award supports outstanding scientists with the intellect, scientific creativity, drive, and maturity bypass the traditional postdoctoral training period to launch independent research careers.
Check out the full release on Vanderbilt’s site here.
