Cooper Bio:
Dr. Judith A. Cooper is currently Deputy Director of the National
Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders at the NIH. In
addition, she serves as Director, Division of Scientific Programs,
within NIDCD, and finally, she has programmatic responsibilities for
the areas of language, language impairments, and language in deaf
individuals. She received her B.F.A. at Southern Methodist University
in 1971 with a major in Speech-Language Pathology, her M.S. in
Speech-Language Pathology at Vanderbilt University in 1972, and her
Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1982 in Speech and Hearing
Sciences. She was elected a Fellow of the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2006 and received the Honors of
the Association in 2007.

She joined the National Institutes of Health as a Health Scientist
Administrator (HSA) within the National Institute of Neurological and
Communicative Disorders and Stroke in November, 1982. Dr. Cooper became
an HSA within the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication
Disorders, upon its establishment in October, 1988; subsequently served
as Deputy Director as well as acting director of the Division of Human
Communication; Chief, Scientific Programs Branch; and has been in her
current position since January, 2004.


Dr. Cooper's current responsibilities include overseeing and
coordinating the activities of her division; advising within NIDCD
and across the NIH regarding issues related to language and language
disorders; participating in trans-NIH initiatives focused in language
as well as autism; and, working with potential and funded researchers
in language across the US and beyond, providing advice, direction, and
encouragement related to research grant focus, development and
preparation.

Cowles Bio:
Dr. Wind Cowles is currently a Scientific Review Officer (SRO) at the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review, where she serves as the SRO for the Language and Communication Study Section (LCOM) and the Pilot Clinical Trials for the Spectrum of Alzheimer’s Disease Review Panel. She received her B.A. in Linguistics at the University of Southern California in 1996 with minors in Neuroscience and English-Creative Writing. She received her M.A. in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego in 2000, and her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego in 2003. She has been a member of Phi Beta Kappa since 1996.

Dr. Cowles was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex (UK) where she worked on a project examining the effects of linguistic and attentional focus status on anaphora in sentence processing. Before coming to NIH in 2015, Dr. Cowles was an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Florida and Director of the Language and Cognition Lab. Her research took a multi-methodological approach to examine the interaction of working memory, predictive processing, linguistic representation, and communicative intent in how adult speakers structure and process information during sentence production and comprehension. Additional research interests included the processes underlying reading and reading comprehension, second language acquisition, and the interaction of socio- and psycholinguistic factors in register, speech production, and dialect in children and adults.

As an SRO, Dr. Cowles oversees and coordinates the scientific review of grant applications assigned to LCOM, which includes R01, R21, and R15 applications proposing research on typical and disordered language development. Her activities include identifying, recruiting, and training reviewers, convening review meetings, serving as the official government representative at review meetings, ensuring that NIH review policy is followed, and preparing summary statements, including the written summary of discussion for applications discussed at the meeting.