Screen Exposure and Child Brain Development - Are We Progressing or Regressing?

Speaker: Prof Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Seminar Title: Screen Exposure and Child Brain Development - Are We Progressing or Regressing?

Moderator: Jo Savill, University of Queensland

Format: The talk is for a general audience, runs for 15 to 20 mins, and is followed by an interactive question-and-answer session.

About the speaker: 

Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, PhD is the head of the Educational NeuroImaging Group (ENIG) and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology and the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion.

Tzipi is also an Associate Professor (PAR) at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and at the Neuropsychology Department, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Dr. Horowitz-Kraus received a B.S. in Biology (2002) and an M.S. in Neurobiology (2004) from the Department of Neurobiochemistry at the Tel-Aviv University in Tel-Aviv, Israel. She also received an MA in the clinical program for the diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities (2007, Cum Laude) and was awarded a PhD (2009) by the University of Haifa in Israel from the Edmond J Safra Brain Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities. After completion of her PhD, Dr. Horowitz-Kraus conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Haifa and determined behavioral and electroencephalographic measures following intervention programs for children with learning disabilities, as well as studies aimed at developing objective measures to assess the effectiveness of interventions for reading difficulties.

In 2011, Dr. Horowitz-Kraus was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and moved to the USA to join the Pediatric Neuroimaging Research Consortium at the Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation, where she continued her post-doctoral research using advanced neuroimaging tools, including fMRI, DTI, and EEG, to better understand the role of executive functions in reading disabilities in children in order to develop more effective reading interventions, with a specific emphasis on reading fluency. Tzipi was then appointed as a faculty member and the scientific and program director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center (RLDC) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, USA (2013-2021).

Dr. Horowitz-Kraus’ research focuses on neural circuits that underlie language and reading acquisition in children with language and reading difficulties due to a neurobiological source (dyslexia, ADHD, epilepsy, auditory processing, psychiatric disorders, and more) and environmental deficits (a lack of literacy exposure or increased screen exposure). In parallel, she works on tailoring the most appropriate treatment for each of these disorders, as well as preventing linguistic and reading difficulty using a variety of intervention programs and assessing intervention effectiveness using neuroimaging tools (fMRI, EEG, hyperscanning methods, and eye-tracking).

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To learn more about the seminar series, view past recordings, and contact the organisers, please visit our webpage.