Dr. Steven Small
- Professor of Neuroscience
- Ashbel Smith Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas supports the Ashbel Smith Professorship. Dr. Ashbel Smith was the first president of the UT System Board of Regents. He had a long and distinguished career in medicine, education and public service. During his term on the Board of Regents, Smith was dedicated to recruiting the best faculty members available and to developing a curriculum befitting a “university of the first class.” Smith became known as both the “father of Texas medicine” and the “father of The University of Texas.”
“UT Dallas has the most exciting trajectory of any university in the country. Behavioral and Brain Sciences has a trajectory that is ascending, and my field is what BBS does: neuroscience, psychology, and speech and hearing sciences.”
Dr. Steven Small served as the dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences from 2019 to 2023.
Small has previously served as the chair of the University of California, Irvine Department of Neurology and as director and chief scientific officer of the UC Irvine School of Medicine’s Medical Innovation Institute. Prior to that, he was a professor in the departments of neurology and psychology at the University of Chicago, where he retains professor emeritus status.
Small’s work focuses on understanding the anatomy and physiology of the human brain and its relation to function. His research involves direct investigation of human subjects, particularly in speech and language, and clinical and fundamental neurobiological aspects of mild traumatic brain injuries like concussions, particularly in sports.
“The crux of my work is neurobiology of language. Since I started in computer science, I wanted to know the implementation details,” Small said. “My scientific goal for the school is to bring neuroscience, psychology, and speech and hearing sciences together to build some big projects looking at development across the lifespan.”
Small served as editor-in-chief of the journal Brain and Language from 2005 to early 2019. He is the founder and first president of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language and received its first Distinguished Career Award in 2018. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Neurological Association.
Small, who holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park and a medical degree from the University of Rochester, started his career building computational models of language processing before moving to the direct investigation of human subjects with brain imaging. His work in the neurobiology of language has taken a network approach, emphasizing the multifactorial relation between behavior and brain regions and connections.