Bryan Kolb Lecture in Behavioural Neuroscience

Dr Werker, O.C., University Killam Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Psychology at UBC is a developmental psychologist recognized for her work on infant speech perception and the foundations of language acquisition. She is known particularly for her work examining the effects of experience on speech perception, the multisensory nature of speech perception, and the relationship between speech perception development and word learning. Werker completed her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, with a major in psychology.  After moving to Canada, she attended graduate school at the University of British Columbia (UBC), receiving her PhD in 1982. Her first academic position was in Psychology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and she returned to UBC as a faculty member in 1986. A fellow of AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the National Academy of Science, she is a previous fellow and now advisor to the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research, and a founder and co-director of the UBC Language Sciences Institute. At UBC, she runs the Infant Studies Centre, where infants and their parents participate in research studies.