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Sally Shaywitz
 Scholia has a profile for Sally Shaywitz (Q25884184). Sally Shaywitz (born 1942) is an American physician-scientist who is the Audrey G. Ratner Professor in Learning Development at Yale University. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity.[1] Her research provides the framework for modern understanding of dyslexia. Early life and educationShaywitz was born and raised in The Bronx.[2] She is the daughter of two Eastern European immigrants.[2] Her father was a dressmaker and her mother a homemaker.[2] She earned her undergraduate degree at City College of New York, and originally considered a career in law.[3] She was accepted early to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.[3] That year her mother was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, and died just before Shaywitz started her medical studies.[2] When Shaywitz joined medical school, she was one of four women in a class of one hundred students.[2] Shaywitz completed her residency in pediatrics and developmental pediatrics.[2] Alongside completing her training, Shaywitz had three children, whom she raised in Westport, Connecticut.[4] Research and careerShaywitz started her medical career seeing patients out of her home in suburban Connecticut.[2] She was eventually recruited by Yale University to look after patients with learning disorders, including dyslexia.[2] In 1979 she was recruited by Yale University to see patients with learning disorders, including dyslexia.[5] Her research involves longitudinal epidemiological and neurobiological studies. In 1983 she started tracking a random cohort of children continuously from kindergarten to their current age in their 40s.[1] The longitudinal study data also showed that the achievement gap in reading between typical and dyslexic students occurs early – in first grade and persists. This finding impelled her to develop an evidence-based efficient screener to identify at risk beginning in kindergarten.[1] In 1983 she started tracking a cohort of people from kindergarten to adulthood, a study which became known as The Connecticut Longitudinal Study.[6] She showed that boys and girls were equally as likely to be affected by dyslexia.[7] These studies allowed Shaywitz to identify a neural signature of dyslexia, as well as demonstrating that dyslexia is not simply a reading disorder young people 'outgrow'.[6] According to Shaywitz, dyslexia arises due to inefficient function in the neural systems responsible for skilled reading.[7] Shaywitz developed the "Sea of Strengths" model, which explains that dyslexia is a deficit in language processing.[2] Her research identified that there is no connection between dyslexia and intelligence so that you can be very smart and still read very slowly.[7] In 2003 Shaywitz published Overcoming Dyslexia, a book which helps people identify, understand and overcome challenges in reading.[8] In 2020 she, together with her son, psychiatrist, Jonathan Shaywitz, published the much updated Overcoming Dyslexia 2nd edition.[9] Awards and honors
Selected publicationsAs of 2018, the definition of dyslexia as unexpected is codified in U.S. federal law (U.S. Public Law 115-391): The term “dyslexia” means an unexpected difficulty in reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader, most commonly caused by a difficulty in the phonological processing (the appreciation of the individual sounds of spoken language), which affects the ability of an individual to speak, read, and spell.[19]
Personal lifeShaywitz is married to Bennett Shaywitz, a pediatric neurologist who headed that section at Yale from 1976 to 2015 and with whom she co-founded the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity.[3][20] They met and were married in 1963.[7] References
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