Professor, School of Education, University of California, Irvine (UCI)
Dr. Washington directs the UCI Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub and is Director of the Dialect, Poverty and Academic Success Lab at UCI. Currently, Dr. Washington’s research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty. In particular, the focus of her work is understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment of language competence and on identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension on development of reading and early language skills for children growing up in poverty. She is a member of AIM’s Research Advisory Board and delivered the Norman Geschwind Memorial Lecture at the 2021 Annual Reading, Literacy, and Literature Conference in October.