Intellectual and Developmental Disability News

The Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (KIDDRC) has been awarded a five-year $5.40 million cooperative agreement from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

As a newly minted Ph.D. in the late 1960s, Stephen Schroeder received dozens of small grants from his own institution before grabbing the academic equivalent of the brass ring – a major grant from a federal agency. The time and effort it took left an impression. 

LAWRENCE — Before reaching age 5, up to 45 percent of children in the United States experience “significant and non-normative” trauma such as maltreatment, chronic stress caused by poverty, exposure to violence at home or in the community, or a parent suffering from an alcohol, drug or psychological problem.

LAWRENCE — University of Kansas neuroscientist Jonathan Brumberg has been awarded a $25,000 New Century Scholars Research Grant by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation to develop and test a brain-computer interface (BCI) that will directly control commercially available augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices for individuals with profound speech and motor disorders.

S​helley Bredin-Oja has been named the full-time project coordinator for Fragile X longitudinal research directed by Steve Warren, effective April 1. Bredin-Oja earned her Ph.D. at KU in 2012 in speech-language-hearing and worked in Marc Fey’s Language Intervention Lab at KUMC until February 2015 when she became a part-time associate researcher with Warren. 

Matthew Mosconi, a psychologist, and neuroscientist who studies autism spectrum disorders, will join the University of Kansas as an associate professor in the Clinical Child Psychology Program and associate scientist in the Life Span Institute on August 18.

LAWRENCE — Researchers from three programs affiliated with the University of Kansas Life Span Institute were awarded Empower Kansas grants earlier this month in Parsons by UnitedHealthcare, one of the three managed-care organizations that provide services to Medicaid consumers in Kansas.

Fred Merrill, who with his wife, Virginia, established the Merrill Advanced Studies Center at LSI in 1990, died Oct. 20 in Mission Hills, Kan.