Is There an Environmental Component to Dyslexia?! A Neurophysiologist Weights In!

Fumiko Hoeft MD PhD is a psychiatrist, neurophysiologist, and a developmental cognitive neuroscientist trained clinically at Keio Univ Sch of Med (Tokyo, Japan) and in research at Harvard, UCLA, Caltech and Stanford. She is Associate Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Weill Institute for Neurosciences and Dyslexia Center, and Director of UC Office of the President's Science-based Innovation in Learning Center (SILC), and UCSF Hoeft Laboratory for Educational Neuroscience (brainLENS.org). She is also Scientific Advisory / Executive Board Member of the Bay Area Discovery Museum’s Center for Childhood Creativity (BADM’s CCC), Board Member of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA), and serves as Neuroscientist-in-residence at schools and organizations. Broadly speaking, our group examines brain development and skill acquisition in children at various time-scales and levels using various neuroimaging techniques such as TMS/tDCS, fNIRS, fMRI, aMRI, DI and MEG. We are interested in identifying how biology (gene) and environment influence the development of language, social and executive brain networks. We study healthy children and also children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as idiopathic autism, developmental dyslexia.