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Research Bio and CV

schrauf-aplng-town-hall-2My research interests are a multidisciplinary mix of applied linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and gerontology.  After a dissertation in psychological anthropology on culture and autobiographical memory, I did a postdoc with David Rubin in experimental psychology at Duke University.  It was the era of interdisciplinary cognitive science, and I had funding from NIMH to combine an anthropologist’s interest in culture-and-cognition with a psychologist’s interest in the effects of language on autobiographical memory.  There, and for many years hence, I explored the links between language(s), cultural contexts, and personal memories among older bilingual immigrants.  Toward the end of the postdoc, I was invited to participate in the National Science Foundation’s Summer Institute in Comparative Anthropological Research at the Claremont Colleges in Los Angeles (1998).  This was a defining intellectual moment for me, and I developed an abiding interest in the ethnographic, experimental, and archival methods for pursuing systematic cross-cultural comparisons.  From 2000 through 2004, I was on the faculty of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University as a research associate at the Buehler Center on Aging and a research fellow at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center.  Chicago provided an ideal multicultural and multilingual context in which to consider the interaction of culture, language, and cognitive aging.  There Dr. Madelyn Iris (also an anthropologist of aging) and I collaborated closely on a series of community studies of ethnicity and Alzheimer’s disease—funded generously by NIA and the Illinois Department of Public Health.  In 2004, I moved to the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University.  Here I have deepened my interest in discursive and interactional approaches to language, particularly as a lens through which to understand the layered world of Alzheimer’s disease: a persistent concern for older adults, a diagnostic and treatment challenge for clinicians, and a fundamental threat to existential meaning for persons with the disease. (Download a copy of my cv from my faculty page in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Penn State).

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