Biography

Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola, Ph.D.
Visiting Professor, Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences

Dr. Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. A native of Mexico, she received her bachelor's degree in biology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She went on to Cambridge University, where she investigated the psychology of intellectual development and earned a Master of Philosophy degree. At University College London, she studied the electrophysiology of cross-linguistic speech perception in adults and received a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Dr. Rivera-Gaxiola's primary scientific interest is in the neurobiology of speech and language. She has conducted influential research on speech perception in children and adults, and was the only researcher in Mexico using event-related potentials (ERP) to study speech perception in infants and toddlers. She has reported on her findings at conferences and in scientific journals in Mexico, Europe, and North America.

In her research at the Center, Dr. Rivera Gaxiola uses noninvasive technology, mainly the recording of electroencephalographic activity, and more recently piloted optical topography (OT), to learn more about typical language acquisition in the first year of life. Her syllable- and word-processing research, and her collaborative research on sentence processing, represents a pioneering effort in the study of language acquisition.

Dr. Rivera Gaxiola lives in Seattle and is the mother of a young daughter.

More on Dr. Rivera-Gaxiola:
Curriculum Vitae | Selected Publications | Contact Dr. Rivera-Gaxiola