Dr. Whitford obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive-Experimental Psychology from McGill University (Montreal, Canada).  She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology and Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario (London, Canada). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (under the supervision of Dr. Gigi Luk) and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (under the supervision of Dr. John Gabrieli).  Her research focuses on the behavioral and neural correlates of reading and oral language in adolescents and young adults with diverse language backgrounds.