Dr. Donna Thal is Professor Emerita in the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University and Research Psychologist at the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Thal holds the M.S. degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology from Brooklyn College and the Ph.D. degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Her postdoctoral work was carried out under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Bates at the UCSD Center for Research in Language (1985-1988). Dr. Thal is a developmental psycholinguist and a certified speech-language pathologist who has conducted research in a number of areas including normal and disordered development of language and cognition, studies of children with focal brain injury and studies of children with delayed onset of language. She has also carried out studies of language development in Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers. Her most recent work focuses on early identification of risk for clinically significant language impairment and is funded by RO1 grant from the NIH National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders. She currently serves as the language consultant on a multi-center longitudinal grant focused on the development of deaf children following cochlear implant that is funded by the NIH National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders. Dr. Thal is and ASHA Fellow. She has also been an editorial consultant for language for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. She was the California State nominee for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation Outstanding Clinical Achievement Award in 1996, received the Monty Distinguished Faculty Award from San Diego State University 1998, the Albert W. Johnson Research Lecturer Award from SDSU in 1999, and was the Wang Family Excellence Award nominee from SDSU in 2000. She served a 4 year term on the Communicative Disorders Review Committee for the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders from 1998-2002. Dr. Thal is a member of the CDI Advisory Board and is a co-author of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories and the MacArthur Inventarios del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas.
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