Director of the Brain Development & Education Lab at Stanford University

Director of the Reading and Dyslexia Research Program

Dr. Jason Yeatman is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Department of Psychology at Stanford University and the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Yeatman completed his PhD in Psychology at Stanford where he studied the neurobiology of literacy and developed new brain imaging methods for studying the relationship between brain plasticity and learning. After finishing his PhD, he took a faculty position at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences before returning to Stanford.

As the director of the Brain Development and Education Lab, the overarching goal of his research is to understand the mechanisms that underlie the process of learning to read, how these mechanisms differ in children with dyslexia, and to design literacy intervention programs that are effective across the wide spectrum of learning differences. His lab employs a collection of structural and functional neuroimaging measurements to study how a child’s experience with reading instruction shapes the development of brain circuits that are specialized for this unique cognitive function.

Jason also oversees the Reading & Dyslexia Research Program at Stanford. A collaboration between the Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics within the School of Medicine and the Graduate School of Education, the goal of the Stanford University Reading & Dyslexia Research Program is to understand the factors that contribute to differences in how all children and adults learn to read. With this knowledge we hope to design innovative, personalized education programs to serve the diversity of learners.