Lab Assistants

jessbreeze@uchicago.edu

Jess received her BSc (Hons) in Speech Pathology and Therapy from Manchester Metropolitan University. She then went on to receive an MSc with Distinction in Linguistics from The University of Edinburgh, graduating in 2021. Jess is broadly interested in gesture’s role in learning, and what gesture can teach us about the origins and evolution of language.  She is currently supporting a variety of projects within the lab.

hemani@uchicago.edu

Naureen received her B.A. in Psychology from The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and went on to receive her M.A. in Clinical Psychology in 2009. Naureen currently works on projects that focus on the role of gesture in the acquisition of learning in school-aged children. She works on the Mental Rotation project, which focuses on early spatial learning in kindergarten children, as well as the Math project, which looks at the role of gesture while solving equivalency problems in 3rd and 4th grade students. Naureen is interested in the role that gesture plays in learning and the ways that this type of research can be used in classroom settings.

Contact Naureen for more information or assistance on:
IRB-related matters including–
Protocol amendments
Historical record of protocol events
Submission of adverse events
Human subject training and certification
Annual employee safety training

zena@uchicago.edu

Zena attended the University of Rochester for her B.A. in American Sign Language. She then went on to get her Master’s in Deaf Education at Boston University and graduated in 2017. Zena is currently working on the Math Gesture project with deaf and hearing students. She is interested in established methods of bilingual deaf education, as well as ways to improve on current practices.

Contact Zena for more information or assistance on:
ASL-related projects
The Center for Gesture, Sign and Language (CGSL)

djbyrne@uchicago.edu 

Dan Byrne is the Technical Project Manager for the Susan Goldin-Meadow Lab focusing on software development for data science projects, database infrastructure, and modernizing tech stacks. Dan also conducts and collaborates on several research projects. Specifically, Dan has worked on projects related to abstract-syntactic category acquisition, linguistic alignment in developmental interactions, relational/analogical reasoning, and redacting unstructured data by applying information-theory models and human-in-the-loop paradigms.

cmcm@uchicago.edu

*Carolyn has retired and will be working with the SGM Lab on a part-time basis*