Carol Padden

CAROL PADDEN is Professor of Communication and Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Her areas of research include language emergence and change. She studies newly emerging sign languages at various places around the world, including in a community of Bedouins in southern Israel and in a farming community in southern Turkey. Her work explores how gestural language arises in a community and is transformed into sign language as it is transmitted across generations. She has written numerous academic and popular articles as well as books about sign language grammars and comparative language structure across sign languages. Her work has been supported by the US Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. In 1992 she was awarded a John D. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2010, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Linguistic Society of America.