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Biography

Erin Campbell (she/her) joined the Warner School as an assistant professor in the summer of 2026. Before joining the ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵ, Campbell was a research assistant professor at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. She earned her PhD in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience from Duke University.

Campbell's research investigates how perceptual experience (hearing, vision, touch) and language input shape language and cognition. Her research explores questions such as:

• How does children's access to language and to the world around them shape learning?
• Does language modality (whether a language is spoken, signed, or tactile) change how we think and learn?  
• How do we learn and process the meanings of words for aspects of the world that we can't perceive through the senses? 

To answer these questions, Campbell uses a combination of naturalistic observations, behavioral experiments, assessments, eye-tracking, and electroencephalography (EEG). She works closely with deaf, blind, and DeafBlind communities to involve diverse perspectives and life experiences in all parts of the research process.

Campbell's work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. Her findings have been published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Developmental Science, Cognition, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education.

Through this work, she aims to build more inclusive theories of language and cognitive development that account for diverse languages, language modalities, and sensory experiences, and to translate these discoveries into educational practice and disability policy that improve access for all learners.