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Biography
Dr. Jason Yeatman is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Department of Psychology at Stanford University and the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Yeatman completed his PhD in Psychology at Stanford where he studied the neurobiology of literacy and developed new brain imaging methods for studying the relationship between brain plasticity and learning. After finishing his PhD, he took a faculty position at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences before returning to Stanford.
As the director of the Brain Development and Education Lab, the overarching goal of his research is to understand the mechanisms that underlie the process of learning to read, how these mechanisms differ in children with dyslexia, and to design literacy intervention programs that are effective across the wide spectrum of learning differences. His lab employs a collection of structural and functional neuroimaging measurements to study how a child’s experience with reading instruction shapes the development of brain circuits that are specialized for this unique cognitive function.
As the director of the Brain Development and Education Lab, the overarching goal of his research is to understand the mechanisms that underlie the process of learning to read, how these mechanisms differ in children with dyslexia, and to design literacy intervention programs that are effective across the wide spectrum of learning differences. His lab employs a collection of structural and functional neuroimaging measurements to study how a child’s experience with reading instruction shapes the development of brain circuits that are specialized for this unique cognitive function.
Other titles
Associate Professor, Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education
Associate Professor, Psychology
Member, Bio-X
Member, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Program affiliations
DAPS
Learning Sciences and Technology Design (LSTD)
(MS) LDT
(MS) EDS
Stanford Accelerator for Learning
Research interests
Brain and Learning Sciences | Child Development | Data Sciences | Early Childhood | Literacy and Language | Psychology | Research Methods | Special Education | Technology and Education
Recent publications
Meisler, S. L., Cieslak, M., Bagautdinova, J., Hendrickson, T. J., Pandhi, T., Chen, A. A., … Satterthwaite, T. D. (2026). Highly replicable multisite patterns of adolescent white matter maturation. BioRxiv : the Preprint Server for Biology.
Yao, J. K., Mitchell, J. L., Davison, A., & Yeatman, J. D. (2026). Sulcal anatomy of ventral temporal cortex and reading development. BioRxiv : the Preprint Server for Biology.
Smith, G., Bassoli, E., Ozturk, Y., Arteaga-Garcia, E., Ma, W. A., Roar Developer Consortium, … Caffarra, S. (2026). Similarities (and Differences) in the Learning Patterns of Single-Word Reading of an Alphabetic Orthography in Monolingual and Bilingual Primary School Children: A Cross-Sectional Study. Brain Sciences, 16(4).
