Rebecca Marks (PhD ’21) wins 2021 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award
The ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards (DDA) recognize exceptional work produced by doctoral students for the high caliber of their scholarship and the significance and interest of their findings.
Each year, Rackham Graduate School invites faculty to nominate outstanding dissertations produced in their programs. The nomination dossiers are read and discussed by a review panel of faculty members who identify the finalists. Then, members of the Michigan Society of Fellows read the finalists’ dissertations, review their merits, and select the winners.
Rebecca Marks, who earned her doctoral degree in Education and Psychology from the SOE in 2021, is recognized by the committee for her dissertation, “From Talkers to Readers: Neural and Behavioral Foundations of Emerging Literacy.”
“In Marks’ dissertation, she addresses a fundamental question in education and childhood development: How does spoken language processing support reading development?” writes Shane DuBay in the DDA program. “Marks leverages a series of brain and behavior studies to understand how children build associations between sounds, what they see, and meaning.”