Richard N. Aslin, the William R. Kenan Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, has been awarded an honorary doctorate of social sciences from the Uppsala University, in Sweden. The award ceremony takes place today at Uppsala.
Aslin, the director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging, has studied infant development throughout his career, especially infant language development and visual perception.
"Professor Richard Aslin has exerted an important influence over the research on cognitive development in infants, especially perception and language development," said Anders Malmberg, Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at Uppsala University. "This is reflected in the large number of published articles in highly prestigious scientific journals. He has also devoted much effort to the development of improved scientific methods for infant research."
Aslin works to understand how normal development progresses in human infants and young children who range in age from one month to two years. His research attempts to reveal how infants make sense of the sights and sounds of the world around them, how they learn new patterns in visual scenes and streams of speech, and what brain mechanisms enable these developments to unfold.
Among his many honors, Aslin was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1988, received the University's Robert and Pamela Goergen Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Learning in 2001, and was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He also has held the posts of dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and vice provost and dean of the College.
Before joining the Rochester faculty, Aslin was a faculty member at Indiana University at Bloomington, taught at the University of Minnesota, and was a visiting scientist at the University of Washington's Regional Primate Research Center.
He holds a bachelor's degree from Michigan State University and a doctorate in child psychology from the University of Minnesota.