Rachel Romeo, assistant professor in the University of Maryland College of Education, was recently named one of 12 Jacobs CIFAR Research Fellows in the 2026-28 cohort.
The Jacobs CIFAR Research Fellowship Program offers prestigious fellowships to early- and mid-career researchers whose work is dedicated to improving the learning and development of children and youth worldwide. Formerly known as the Jacobs Research Fellowship, the program has been renamed to reflect a partnership between the Jacobs Foundation and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).
“I’m so honored and excited to receive this fellowship. The funds will allow me to pursue innovative, high risk-high reward research on brain synchronization between students and teachers during real-time in-classroom learning,” said Romeo. “Additionally, I get to join a network of interdisciplinary scholars from around the globe to collaborate on new research ideas and translate our work into policy and practice at scale.”
During the fellowship, Romeo will use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) caps to measure brain-to-brain synchrony between kindergarteners and their teachers during vocabulary lessons. Recent research suggests that greater synchronization leads to better learning. She will study how learning outcomes and underlying neural mechanisms vary across sociodemographics, learning mindsets and the degree of match or mismatch between home and classroom communication styles. In addition, she will examine how individual children’s learning varies across contexts and whether children’s and teachers’ brains become more synchronized over the school year. Through this research, Romeo aims to better understand the mechanisms behind successful learning, factors that drive learning disparities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and potential interventions to address these disparities.
Romeo directs the College of Education’s Language, Experience, and Development (LEAD) lab and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and the interdisciplinary program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. She is also a member of UMD’s Maryland Language Science Center, Graduate Field Committee in Developmental Science, Brain and Behavior Institute and Maryland Neuroimaging Center.
She has received numerous awards, including the Young Investigator Award from Flux: The Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (2024) and awards for early career research contributions from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Society for Research in Child Development (2023).
Romeo joins Associate Professor Chunyan Yang, who is a Jacobs Research Fellow in the 2024-2026 cohort. Through her fellowship, Yang is studying how educators are leveraging artificial intelligence-enabled edtech tools to strengthen the systematic implementation of social and emotional learning and to deepen its integration with academic instruction.
