Congratulations to Dr. Zhao!

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Christina Zhao, a graduate student working with Patricia Kuhl, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in speech and hearing sciences on March 17.

Zhao’s dissertation is titled “Music exposure enhances infants’ neural processing of temporal structure in music and speech.”

Coincidentally the same day as her defense, Zhao’s pre-dissertation project examining the interaction between music and speech in adults was published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Zhao will spend an additional year at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences as a postdoctoral fellow. The findings she presented at her defense is just the first wave of other analyses she plans to run on the data she collected, Zhao said. She will use her postdoctoral year to examine the data more closely and prepare research papers for publication.