Kenneth Pugh receives NIH MERIT Award

Yale associate professor of Linguistics and Diagnostic Radiology Kenneth R. Pugh is the recipient of the prestigious Method to Extend Research in Time, or MERIT Award, bestowed by the National Institutes of Health. The award provides support for research for five years, with the opportunity for an additional two to five years of extended support.

Based on the endorsement of the National Advisory Child Health and Human Development Council, the award recognizes Pugh’s contributions to the understanding of reading and reading disability. The Council recognized his many accomplishments including his work identifying differences between typically developing readers and those with disability; publishing brain-based models of reading development; and demonstrating the ‘normalization” of the brain’s reading network in response to interventions.

With the MERIT Award, Pugh will apply the highest density neurocognitive measurement to the understanding of how reading interventions affect the brain development of learners, and why some learners are more responsive than others.

Pugh is also President and Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories, a Yale University and University of Connecticut affiliated research institution in New Haven. He also directs the Yale Reading Center.