The University of New Hampshire’s College of Health and Human Services has appointed Laura Gonnerman, Ph.D., as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, effective January 23, 2024.
Dr. Gonnerman comes to UNH from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where she was Associate Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Prior to joining the faculty at McGill, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She earned a B.A. in German from Boston University, an M.A. in German and an M.A. in French from Middlebury College, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. She completed postdoctoral training in Psychology and Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.
Her research focuses on the development of word knowledge across the lifespan, ranging from toddlers to older adults, in typical and atypical populations. Her current projects are focused on using morphological knowledge to improve reading and spelling in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children.
Dr. Gonnerman is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of linguistics, with more than 40 peer-reviewed, data-based publications to her credit. She has received funding from both the US DHHS/National Institutes of Health as well as Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and has also received numerous awards for her teaching and research excellence, both in the US and in Canada.
