Carol Padden

Carol Padden is the Sanford I. Berman Endowed Professor of Communication and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She has published on language emergence, culture and genes, comparative sign language structure, and reading in deaf children. With Tom Humphries, she is the co-author of four books on culture and community of deaf people in the United States. In recent years, she and her research team have been studying new sign languages in Israel and Turkey and documenting the spontaneous emergence of language in small communities. She is most recently involved in a collaborative effort to adapt depth-sensing cameras and video data analysis tools (i.e., Microsoft Kinect cameras and ChronoViz) for purposes of quantitative measures of movement-based language and communication, including for gesture and sign languages. Her work has been supported by: the U.S. Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. In 1992 she was awarded a John D. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2010, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She was elected Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.