Language, Experience, and Development (LEAD) Lab

The LEAD Lab's 2024 Wrapped

2024 was another incredibly exciting year full of more research, community work, and achievement for the LEAD Lab!

Most excitingly, our Lab Director Dr. Rachel Romeo welcomed baby Cameron into the world in June 2024! Our entire team has fallen in love with Cam, and her visits to the lab have been key for our morale. We are all so happy for Rachel and her family, and thanks to the NIH Maternity Supplement awarded to Rachel, she was able to spend quality family time at home with Cam in the first few months of her life. Rachel was also awarded the Flux 2024 Young Investigator Award in September 2024, and her family and the lab were there to watch her on stage!

In addition, the lab also was awarded a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to adapt and evaluate the Hatchlings program. which empowers under-resourced new parents to engage their babies in early language- and literacy-building activities. This 3-year project will be spearheaded by Ellie Taylor-Robinette, former LEAD lab manager, and now first-year PhD student and UMD Flagship Fellowship recipient. On top of that, Ellie also got married in July 2024 -  congratulations Ellie & Michael! 

Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova (third-year doctoral student) was awarded the UMD Faculty-Student Research Award (FSRA) for her work on a project at the Planet Word Museum. Her “Light Up Your Language Brain” station at the museum is investigating how familiarity helps with recall in conversation. 220 museum visitors have already gotten involved in Gavkhar’s research, so please stop by the Planet Word Museum if you would also like to participate and measure your brain activity! Gavkhar also received the UMD’s Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) certificate, and gave an insightful UMD Language Science Lunch Talk, entitled “Language and executive functioning co-development in early childhood”.

Additionally, Ellen Roche (third-year doctoral student) was awarded the NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) for her project entitled "Development in the Moment: Does Caregiver Sensitivity Drive Prefrontal Cortex Synchrony?". The success of our PhD students didn’t stop there though, as both Ellen and Victoria Terry (fourth-year doctoral student) advanced to candidacy in their PhDs - congratulations to both Ellen and Victoria! Eliza Thompson (second-year doctoral student) was also promoted to Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. Lastly, Alexa McDorman (fifth-year doctoral student) won a SPARC grant from the College of Education to fund their dissertation, as well as passing their dissertation proposal, meaning they are now officially ‘all but dissertation’!

2024 was also a spectacular year for the LEAD Lab’s amazing undergraduate Research Assistants. Fati Rosales-Lima presented at the Maryland Hispanic Applied Linguistic Conference, and Alex Haralanova (senior RA) submitted her honors thesis proposal for neuroscience. Fatou Sall and Telise Arce-Reed (senior RAs) were both also accepted onto the UMD REACH Program. Finally, 2024 was a very special year for Abria Simmon’s (senior RA) Hair Equity Project, part of her research for the UMD McNair program, which was covered by two articles in WBAL and Yahoo News, as well as being included in UMD’s College of Education “Transforming Education For Good” Video. She and Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova presented on hair equity in fNIRS research in the most attended webinar ever by fNIRS manufacturer NIRx. Stay tuned for the first paper from this work to be published in 2025!

On top of all these successful grant proposals, presentations, and awards, the LEAD Lab has still been busily collecting data for our Preschool Language and Neural Engagement Study (PLANES). Our amazing team has successfully carried out 95 lab visits for PLANES across the 45 families who are now involved in the study. 2024 also saw our first few PLANES families return to the lab for their Year 2 visits. We have completed 17 Year 2 visits so far across 7 different families, and we can’t wait to see even more of our PLANES families back at the LEAD Lab in 2025 for their Year 2 visits!

The LEAD lab also published 9 journal articles on our research – check them out over at our Publications page! Short summaries to come soon. 

Most importantly, 2024 has been another year full of different community events for the LEAD Lab. In total we attended 9 Playtime Programs, where we helped to create safe and fun play spaces for children living in homeless shelters. Alexus Ramirez and Mariah Egerton attended several of the Crossroads Farmers Markets, where they held clothing drives for families in need. They’ll be resuming these in Spring 2025 so please donate any adult or children’s clothes to the LEAD Lab which you may want to contribute!

We want to say a BIG thank you to all of the amazing families who take time out of their busy schedules to get involved with the LEAD Lab. Our research simply wouldn’t be possible without your incredible contributions. We can’t wait to share our studies’ findings with you as we start to dive into the data. Keep an eye out for our LEAD Lab monthly newsletters which will keep you updated on our papers, presentations, posters and more in 2025! 

April 27, 2022
Congratulations to Ananya Devadiga and Daniel Pyo on presenting their outstanding independent research projects at the University of Maryland Undergraduate Research Symposium! Ananya and Daniel are both med school-bound, and we will miss them after they graduate this year. Congrats!

April 15, 2022
Congratulations to master's student Grace Kim on an excellent poster presentation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Student Research Symposium today! This was the culmination of Grace's master's research project on semantic contingency in adult-child conversation. Great work Grace!

April 12, 2022
Congratulations to research affiliate Klaudia Kulawska, who accepted an offer for the PhD in Counseling Psychology program at Lehigh University! Klaudia has been working with the LEAD lab for nearly 2 years and completed her undergraduate honors thesis under Dr. Romeo's supervision. We will certainly miss her, but are so excited for this amazing next step in her career. Congrats Klaudia!

April 5, 2022
Congratulations to graduate student Victoria Alexander, first year student in the Human Development doctoral program, who was accepted into the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science certificate program. Victora will complete the NACS certificate under Dr. Romeo's supervision. Congrats and welcome Victoria!

April 4, 2022
Congratulations to graduate student Alexa McDorman who was named to the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program! The NSF GRFP that recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines. The five-year fellowship is an incredibly prestigious award  and includes three years of financial support that will fund the remainder of Alexa's doctoral study. Congrats Alexa!

March 31, 2022
Congratulations to master's student Amanda Rosenberg and research affiliate Amy Carolus for presenting excellent posters at the Society for Affective Science this week! Amanda presented findings from her master's thesis on  parents' regulations strategies in childhood predicting adolescent mental health, and Amy presented findings from her post-bacc work on emotional awareness and emotional regution in youth. Congrats Amanda and Amy!

March 16, 2022
Welcome to incoming graduate students Ellen Roche and Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova! Ellen will begin the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science doctoral program and Gavkhar will join the Human Development doctoral program, and both have received the prestigious Flagship Fellowship for outstanding incoming graduate students. Congratulations Ellen and Gavkhar, and welcome to the LEAD lab!

February 22, 2022
Congratulations to Dr. Romeo, who was recently named a Rising Star by the American Psychological Society! The APS Rising Star designation is presented to outstanding APS members in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD, and recognizes researchers whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions. Congrats Dr. Romeo!

February 10, 2022
The LEAD lab is hiring! Read our ad for a lab manager here and apply here!

February 3, 2022
The LEAD lab just received it's first grant! We will be investigating how various dimensions of parent-child interaction scaffold neurodevelopment for language, executive functioning, and social cognition. Read more at https://reporter.nih.gov/search/5pbUCFBia0WHYIFdiRmKwA/project-details/10536784

September 1, 2021
Dr. Romeo is accepting graduate students to start in Fall of 2022! Please see the Prospective Students page to learn more. We hope to see you in the LEAD lab soon!