Rachel Romeo, PhD (Entered Harvard Aug 2012, Graduated 2018)  

With a background in psychology and linguistics, Dr. Romeo was interested in how early language experience influences brain development in children, and how this varies by family socioeconomic status. She initiated and led a new collaboration between Dr. John Gabrieli’s lab at MIT (which has expertise in brain imaging) and Dr. Meredith Rowe’s lab (which has expertise in child language development) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Rachel’s research produced the first evidence of how early language experience is associated with variation in functional and structural development of the child’s brain. After graduating from SHBT, Dr. Romeo received her clinical certification in SLP and completed postdoctoral training in neurodevelopmental disorders with Dr. Charles Nelson at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she researched language and brain development in children with Autism. She is currently completing a K99 Pathway to Independence postdoc at Harvard studying how early adversity affects language and brain development, and she will begin the R00 portion in 2022 as an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland College Park. Her work has received international press and awards from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Flux Congress, and the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.