Meet the Team
Ana Taboada Barber
Director of the Reading, Engagement, and Diversity (READ) Lab
Ana Taboada Barber serves as Associate Dean of Research, Innovation, and Partnerships, and as Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education. Dr. Taboada Barber studies reading comprehension from a cognitive and motivational perspective. Her work centers on studying the influence of specific motivational variables (e.g., autonomy support, self-efficacy) and cognitive variables (e.g., executive function skills; inference making) on the literacy and language development of elementary and middle school students. She is interested in studying reading comprehension within classroom instructional contexts as well as an individual difference variable. As a former English as a Second Language teacher in full language immersion settings, Ana’s work in reading comprehension development is principally concentrated within the population of English Learners (ELs) or emergent bilinguals within the United States. More recently, she has extended her focus to include Spanish-speaking students in South American countries (e.g., Chile and Argentina) and Francophone countries. In the last ten years, Ana has turned her attention to the possible roles that executive function skills (i.e., working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility as well as Executive Control) as one component of a larger system of self-regulation, play in the reading comprehension of Emergent Bilinguals in English-only and dual language immersion settings.
SONIA URBANO AGUILAR
READ Lab Coordinator
Sonia Urbano Aguilar moved to the United States in 2021 as part of an exchange program. In 2023, she started attending UMBC, where she 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.
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 bachelor’s degree in English Language Literature Studies from Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University and 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.
