Research Interests "I have lived my life in the service of words: finding where they hide in the convoluted recesses of the brain, studying their layers of meaning and form, and teaching their secrets to the young." So began my book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. My research and teaching continue these three essential, life-spanning directions--- the science of the reading brain; the development of language and reading; and multiple applications of this knowledge base for children, particularly those who have reading challenges. My research group and I use the convergent tools of cognitive neurosciences, child language, and child development to understand the unique, less studied strengths and more documented weaknesses in children with dyslexia, using tools as varied as brain-imaging to genetic studies. Simultaneously, we investigate the particular challenges in reading acquisition for individuals who are bilingual, bi-dialectal (particularly children who speak African-American English), and/or living in impoverished environments. To release the potential of all these children is our life's work. In our applications of this three-pronged knowledge base, we have created interventions (RAVE-O) that simulate the young reading brain, and we have investigated their efficacy through more than a decade of NICHD-supported randomized treatment-control studies. We are in the beginning of understanding the promising application of this work for children who are bilingual and bi-dialectal. In the process of this work, we are studying the fascinating connections between music and written language and whether music can become incorporated in early intervention. We have created and tested diagnostic materials for rapid word-retrieval processes, or naming speed, (RAN/RAS) that predict reading performance in children with reading challenges around the world. Currently and perhaps counter-intuitively, I am immersed in questions about both the advantages and the threats to the present expert reading brain, as our society moves from a literacy-based culture to a digital one. Most recently, my group and I are working on a global literacy project (globallit.com) in which we are creating an open source platform for helping children learn to read who live in remote regions of the world with no access to school or teacher. Our current deployments are in Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, India, Bangladesh, and rural United States. In bringing literacy to non-literate populations our goals are to help to reduce poverty, increase health, economic development, and gender equality by creating tools to advance the potential of children around the world and in our own backyards.