Meet the Team
Ana Taboada Barber
Director of the Reading, Engagement, and Diversity (READ) Lab
Ana Taboada Barber is a Professor in the College of Education. Her research explores how cognitive processes (like executive function and question generation) and motivational factors (such as autonomy support and self-efficacy) shape literacy and language development in elementary and middle school students across diverse classroom and individual contexts.
Drawing on her experience as an English as a Second Language teacher in immersion settings, Ana’s work centers on Multilingual Learners and Emergent Bilinguals in the United States. She has recently expanded her research to Spanish‑speaking students in Chile and Argentina, as well as learners in Francophone countries. Over the past decade, she has increasingly focused on how executive function skills—including working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and broader executive control—contribute to multilingual learners’ reading development as part of a larger system of self‑regulation.
SONIA URBANO AGUILAR
READ Lab Coordinator
Sonia Urbano Aguilar attended UMBC and earned her B.S. in Psychology in 2025. Back in Argentina, she studied Psychopedagogy and gained extensive experience working with children, both as a psychopedagogy apprentice and as a ballet teacher. She joined the READ lab in June of 2024.
MARIEH ARNETT
Data Manager
Marieh Arnett has an M.S. in Quantitative Methodology from the University of Maryland, College Park. She holds an M.P.S in Clinical Psychological Science, a B.S in Psychology with a minor in Spanish, and a B.S in Statistics, all from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has experience with data analysis relating to multiple fields of study, and her specific interests deal with causal inference and exploring the relationships and connections between variables. She is super excited to work on a project that has such a significant impact on today’s youth.
YUANKE PAN
Graduate Research Assistant
Yuanke Pan is a doctoral student in Special Education. She earned a master’s degree in TESOL from the University of Hong Kong. After three years of teaching in a Chinese public primary school, Yuanke developed a strong interest in bilingual children’s reading comprehension. The students in her class inspired her to commit to supporting struggling readers, which led her to join the READ Lab and pursue her academic passion.
ALEXANDRA LOPEZ RODRIGUEZ
Research Assistant
Alexandra Lopez Rodriguez is a research assistant with a Bachelor’s in Psychology from the University of Maryland. She served as a bilingual assessor for the first time in the fall of 2022 and has since assisted with behind-the-scenes tasks, including data organization. As an aspiring mental health professional, she cherishes the well-being and accomplishments of others (especially today’s youth and children). She enjoys baking, hanging out with her sister, and listening to rock music. She is very grateful for all she has learned thus far and is excited to foster bilingualism with everyone.
Co-Principal Investigator
Kelly B. Cartwright is the Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy in the Department of Reading and Elementary Education at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Kelly’s research explores the development of skilled reading comprehension and the neurocognitive, linguistic, and affective factors that underlie reading comprehension processes and difficulties from preschool through adulthood. Kelly has a particular interest in the role of executive function processes (mental skills that support goal-directed activities), such as cognitive flexibility, in the development of skilled reading comprehension, and she wrote the first comprehensive text on this topic (Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension, Guilford, 2015). Kelly’s has developed reading-specific executive function assessments and interventions, and her graphophonological-semantic cognitive flexibility assessment has been adapted for use in several languages. More recently, she has turned her attention to the roles of executive function processes in particular domains of reading comprehension, such as health literacy and mathematics word problem comprehension; contributions of executive functions to other individual difference variables that support reading comprehension, such as strategic processing; and to reading comprehension development in Spanish-speaking English learners through her collaboration with the READ Lab.