Dr. Julie Washington is a professor in the School of Education at the University of California – Irvine (UCI). She is a speech-language pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. She also directs the Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub (funded by the National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development), and is the director of the Language Variation and Academic Success Lab at UCI. Dr. Washington’s research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty. Specifically, her work concentrates on understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment outcomes, identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children, and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension in the development of early reading and language skills for children growing up in poverty. Dr. Washington has a B.A. in English from Spelman College, an M.S. in Speech and Language Pathology from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Education (Speech and Language Pathology) from the University of Michigan.
Current role