Dr. Mandy Maguire

The chair was established anonymously in 2010 to honor UT System Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa and to support the research and scholarly activities of the director of the Center for Children and Families.

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“To better understand child development, we must expand developmental research, which requires expanding both who is studied and who is performing the research. We are incredibly well poised for this transition at CCF.”

Dr. Mandy Maguire’s research uses neuroscience to examine how the brain processes language, how typically developing children learn language, and how socioeconomic status affects both processes.

In her Developmental Neurolinguistics Lab at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders, she and her doctoral, graduate and undergraduate students are investigating how children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds learn new words in auditory and written contexts; how competing noise and semantic constraints influence sentence processing in children and college students; and how bilingual children compare to native English speakers in terms of language acquisition in early childhood. Many of her studies use electroencephalography to visualize what the brain is doing at given points in time.

In 2024, she was appointed director of the Center for Children and Families (CCF), which provides research and training for students in developmental science, in addition to service to local children and families. CCF was founded in 2008 by developmental psychologists in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences with support from a three-year, $350,000 matching grant from the Meadows Foundation.

In 2021, CCF began hosting a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site. The 42-week paid internship annually provides 10 students from UT Dallas and Dallas-area community colleges with the tools and connections to combine high-quality, developmental research with an empirically driven, community-based outreach program. Maguire has been the principal investigator for the REU site since its initiation.

Throughout her career, Maguire has focused on some of the most crucial questions in developmental psychology: Why do children learn languages so easily, while many adults struggle to learn a second language? Why do some children learn their native language more easily than others? How do socioeconomic variables impact language learning and processing?

Previous work by Maguire has examined characteristics of grade-school students who struggle at word learning versus those who excel; why different areas of the brain are engaged in identifying objects versus animals; and why verbs are more difficult for children to learn than nouns.

Maguire received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from The Pennsylvania State University and her doctorate in developmental psychology from Temple University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Louisville, she joined the UTD faculty in 2005.