Bio

Dr. Demir-Lira is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Research at Dr. Demir-Lira's Development, Experience and Neurocognition (DEN) lab addresses the long-standing question of why some children, often from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, fall behind their peers in academic achievement while others thrive. Dr. Demir-Lira and her team take several major approaches to address this broad question. Her work combines behavioral methods that illuminate children’s home experiences with neuroimaging measures that reveal the neurocognitive basis of children’s academic performance. She leverages naturalistic, longitudinal observations and experimental designs to examine how the early parental input in the home environment relates to children’s later literacy and arithmetic skills. She complements this approach with structural and functional neuroimaging measures to analyze how parental background and parental input relate to the neurocognitive basis of children’s literacy and arithmetic skills, and how these neurocognitive correlates, in turn, relate to children’s academic success.