Meet the Team

Anna Grace Butler | ReadNet Project Coordinator

Anna Grace Butler is the ReadNet Project Coordinator. She is also on the Project Management team for the Reach Every Reader Project at Florida State University. Anna Grace received her MSW in Clinical Social Work from Florida State University after obtaining her BA in Child Development and Family Studies from Berry College. Anna Grace joined the Florida Center for Reading Research in 2018 as Dr. Yaacov Petscher’s Executive Assistant. She has been on the Reach Every Reader Project since its first year in multiple capacities from Data Collector to Graduate Assistant before joining as faculty in 2023. Her primary interests include childhood trauma, mental health, and early learning assessment and intervention.

Cody Diefenthaler | Manager of Interactive Development, FSU

Cody Diefenthaler has spent over a decade exploring the intersection between interactive media and learning. As Manager of Interactive Development, Diefenthaler coordinates technical production and game activities for the Reach Every Reader Screener. When not designing software and games, Cody spends his time in Tallahassee, FL playing music, creating art, and having adventures big and small with his partner and two children.

Eric Falke | Director of Applied Educational Neuroscience Initiative, MIT

A physician neuroscientist, Dr Falke leads an applied neuroscience initiative in the Gabrieli lab at MIT.  The initiative employs basic cognitive neuroscience research to improve academic outcomes, such as reading and math, in school-age children. A major focus is generating scalable multi-dimensional learning profiles to guide targeted instruction. As he has for nearly a decade,  Dr. Falke continues to serve as the Director of Targeted Interventions and Research at Carroll school, a school for children who struggle to learn reading in typical education environments.

Fabio Catania | Postdoctoral Fellow

Fabio Catania is a postdoctoral fellow at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, with research interests in human-computer interaction, conversational technology, and voice signal processing. He received his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and completed his Ph.D. in Information Technology from the same institution. Fabio’s current work involves recognizing the communicative intent of vocal expressions generated by minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder.

Grace Lin | Learning Scientist and Assessment Designer

Grace Lin is a learning scientist and assessment designer at MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program | The Education Arcade who is particularly interested in measurement and playful assessments for and of learning. In addition to her assessment work, her research focuses on the intersection between technology and cognition, especially language and literacy. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from UC Irvine, Ed.M. in Mind, Brain, and Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a BA in Psychology from New York University.

Halie Olson | Ph.D. Candidate and Reasearch Assistant

Halie Olson is a PhD candidate in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT. She uses neuroimaging methods such as fMRI to study language and literacy development in children. Halie holds a Bachelor’s degree in Neurobiology from Harvard College.

Hugh Catts | Professor

Hugh Catts leads the development for the reading/language portion of the Reach Every Reader assessment. Hugh’s research interests include the early identification and prevention of language-based reading disabilities. He is currently involved in two longitudinal investigations related to early identification. With Reach Every Reader, he and his co-investigators are developing and evaluating a multivariate longitudinal assessment designed to screen for dyslexia and other language and literacy difficulties. In another project, he is working with colleagues in the Psychology Department to identify and follow approximately 250 toddlers with a family history of dyslexia and/or language impairment. This project, funded by the NIH as part of the Florida Learning Disabilities Research Center, uses child, familial, and environmental data to model the co-development of language and pre-literacy skills and their relationship to the emergence of early reading achievement.  In addition to these projects, he continues to work with colleagues and students on projects related to reading comprehension development and disorders.

Jamie Quinn | Research Faculty

Jamie Quinn earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in August of 2016 at Florida State University. After completing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship position at the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at The University of Texas at Austin, Jamie joined the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) as a postdoctoral research scholar in fall of 2017, and accepted a research faculty position in the spring of 2018. Jamie is a methodologist and budding psychometrician on the Reach Every Reader project.

Jeff Mentch | Graduate Student

Jeff is a PhD student in the Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology. His research focuses on applying machine learning approaches to large open naturalistic fMRI datasets. His has experience in fields including eye-tracking, VR, autism, Alzheimer’s clinical trials, music, and marine biology.

John Gabrieli | Professor

John Gabrieli has faculty appointments in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. He is Director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute and a Principal Investigator in that Institute. He also has appointments in the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Karolina Wade | Speech Language Pathologist, Psychoeducational Evaluator

Karolina Wade is the psychoeducational evaluator in the Gabrieli Lab at MIT. She oversees the educational assessment aspect of various literacy studies in the lab in addition to maintaining a database, organizing and helping to analyze data, as well as community outreach and recruitment. Karolina received her master’s degree in Speech Language Pathology from Boston University and worked with children in the clinic setting for several years prior to joining the Gabrieli Lab. Karolina’s interest in literacy has also led her to pursue further training in this area as she is currently completing the Literacy and Language Program at MGH Institute of Health Professions.

Meral Hacikamiloglu | Research Assistant

Meral Hacikamiloglu is a Research Assistant at Reach Every Reader where she contributes to early literacy research through data analysis and management. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Medicine, Health & Society from Vanderbilt University.

Ola Ozernov-Palchik | Lecturer on Education

Ola Ozernov-Palchik, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral associate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying reading development and dyslexia. Ola applies neurocognitive methods to investigating individual differences in dyslexia in emerging readers. She is interested in the interplay between children and their environment in shaping the development of reading skills. The reciprocity between research and real-world practices is an important goal of her work.

Rebecca Marks | Postdoctoral Fellow

Rebecca Marks is a postdoctoral researcher at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the MGH Institute of Health Professions. She studies language and literacy development, with a particular focus on bilingual children and children with dyslexia. Her work lies at the intersection of developmental psychology, education, and cognitive neuroscience, where she uses behavioral and neurocognitive approaches to examine how language development lays the foundation for successful reading in linguistically diverse learners. Rebecca holds a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Education & Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Sarah O’Dell | Project Coordinator, FSU

Sarah O’Dell manages project operations for the Reach Every Reader screener including school recruitment, staff recruitment and training, data collection, and reporting. Sarah received an MSW in Clinical Social Work with an additional graduate certificate in Cultural Competency in Disaster Recover from Florida State University in 2007. She has since worked at the Florida Center for Reading Research in a variety of roles across projects, and most recently at the FSU College of Medicine, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine studying women’s mental health and child welfare.

Satrajit Ghosh | Principal Research Scientist

Satrajit Ghosh received his BS (with Honors) in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore and his PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University. In addition to his role at the McGovern Institute, Ghosh is an assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School. He is also the director of Data Models and Integration project of ReproNim, an NIH P41 Center for Reproducible Neuroimaging Computation. He is also a co-editor-in-chief of BMC NeuroCommons, a journal focussed on enhancing the digital Commons for neuroscience through increased data, software, and reproducible results.

Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel | Principal Research Scientist

Dr. Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1965 and her Ph.D. in psychology from MIT in 1975. She was Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell University from 1974 to 1979 before joining RLE in 1980.

Dr. Shattuck-Hufnagel investigates the cognitive structures and processes involved in speech production planning, particularly at the level of speech sound sequencing. Her work with speech error patterns and with the acoustic analyses of prosody has implications for cognitive models of speech production and for phonological theory, as well as applications in speech recognition and synthesis.

Steven Meisler | Ph.D. Candidate and Research Assistant

Xochitl Arechiga | Technical Associate

Xochitl Arechiga is a Technical Associate at the Gabrieli Lab where she oversees data collection for two projects. Prior to Reach Every Reader, Xochitl spent her time obtaining her Masters in the Mind, Brain and Education Program at HGSE. There, Xochitl focused on bilingualism and took courses focused on brain development and how executive function varies in bilingual individuals. Further, while at HGSE, she worked closely with Joanna Christodoulou to observe how summer intervention studies affect the summer slump in struggling readers. Her main areas of focus are bilingualism, socioeconomic status, and identity development. Xochitl has her Bachelor’s Degree from Pomona College in Neuroscience.

Yaacov Petscher | Associate Professor

Yaacov Petscher leads the conceptual development of the screener, the psychometric and CAT development, and the biopsychosocial content for the Reach Every Reader assessment. His research interests are the study of individual differences in reading and language skills, and has over 150 publications in the domains of literacy, psychometrics, and applied research methods; he has been a PI or co-PI on 30 state or federally funded grants and contracts. He has served as a lead developer and psychometrician of four, large scale computer-adaptive tests of reading and language skills, and has worked as the principal methodologist for several multi-site randomized controlled trials. He presently serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Educational Psychology, Reading Research Quarterly, and Annals of Dyslexia and is an associate editor for Elementary School Journal and Journal of Learning Disabilities. His work has been recognized with state, national and international research awards from the International Literacy Association, the American Educational Research Association, the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, and the Florida Educational Research Association. More recently, his applied work is focused on technology innovation resulted in multiple co-invented patents and copyrights, with his technologies recognized by awards from the International Society for Technology in Education, Tech and Learning Magazine, and a Florida State University Innovator Award.