Mabel L Rice

- Fred and Virginia Merrill Distinguished Professor of Advanced Studies
- Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Speech-Language-Hearing
- Child Language Doctoral Program
Contact Info
Biography —
Mabel L. Rice, PhD, is the Fred & Virginia Merrill Distinguished Professor of Advanced Studies at the University of Kansas.
She directs the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, the Child Language Doctoral Program, and the NIDCD-funded Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences of Communication Disorders (P30 DC005803). She directs the Language Acquisition Studies Laboratory, and is the PI on two longitudinal language acquisition studies funded by NIDCD (R01 DC005226, R01 DC001803). She is a member of the Scientific Leadership Group for the NIH Pediatric HIV/AIDS Cohort Study (PHACS, U01 HD052104) and a Co-PI on an NIH Small Business Tech Transfer grant (STTR, R42 DC013749) with Richard Ellenson. She also directs a NIDCD-funded training grant (T32 DC000052).
She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at MIT, Harvard, the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and a Japan Fellow in Tokyo.
Research —
Her research is multidisciplinary and internationally collaborative. Her lab is funded by NIDCD for an ongoing longitudinal, family-based genetic study of language acquisition of children with and without SLI (R01 DC001803), based in the Midwest, and for an ongoing epidemiologically ascertained longitudinal family-based genetic study of twins (R01 DC005226), with data collection in Western Australia.
She enjoys and appreciates the support and contributions of scientific collaborators from Nebraska (Shelley Smith), New York (Richard Ellenson), Australia (Steve Zubrick and Cate Taylor), Washington University (Brad Schlagger and Steve Petersen), Switzerland (Javier Gayán), Tulane University (Russ Van Dyke), University of Illinois (Ken Rich) and Norway (Synnve Schjolberg), as well as the members of the Language Acquisition Studies Lab at the University of Kansas. She is a Partner Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University, directed by Stephen Crain.
For her research she has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Psychological Association (APA), Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). She also received ASHA Honors and the Alfred A. Kawana Council of Editors Award from ASHA. She is an Affiliate of the American Health Council. In her role as Director of the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, she organizes scientific conferences and dissemination of papers on research in public universities, and produces papers and edited books on emerging cross-disciplinary topics related to language, cognition and neuroscience.
Research interests:
- Language impairments in children
- genetics of language
Teaching —
She has an extensive record of mentoring doctoral and post-doctoral students. She has directed a T32 NIDCD training grant for more than 20 years and has directed training grants from NINDS and the Department of Education. She received the John C. Wright Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award.
Teaching interests:
- Language impairments in children
Selected Publications —
Selected Presentations —
Awards & Honors —
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Journals Board
2015 - 2019
2018
American Psychiatric Association
2009 - 2012
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
2008 - 2012
University of Kansas
2009
2008
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
2005
University of Kansas
2004
1996
1994
2017 - Present
American Psychological Association, Division 1, 7
American Association for the Advancement of Science
2004 - Present
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
1988 - Present
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
2004 - Present
National Institutes of Health
2005 - Present
Service —
She served as co-Chair for KU's Strategic Planning from 2012 – 2014. She serves on numerous editorial boards of professional organizations and on the Publication Board of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, with a term as Chair beginning in 2015.