Education

Graduate School
Developmental, Cognitive, and Behavioral Neurosciences, University of Houston in Houston, Texas 2018
Fellowship
Developmental Neuroscience, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, 2019-2020

Areas of Interest

Research Interests

During her graduate training, Dr. Vaughn’s research focused on how the brain supports language and cognition in adult bilinguals and monolinguals. She then received postdoctoral training in pediatric neuroimaging under the mentorship of Dr. Dana DeMaster.

Dr. Vaughn’s research is broadly focused on supporting the development of bilingual children. She is interested in the neural underpinnings of typical and atypical language development and the relationship between language development and cognitive development for bilingual children.Dr. Vaughn is currently involved in research on bilingual development and brain development using MRI. She is part of an NIH-funded investigation of the impact of PALS (Play and Learning Strategies) intervention on brain development in toddlers born preterm (PIs: Susan Landry, Dana DeMaster, and Johanna Bick). She is also a co-investigator on an IES-funded project (PIs: Susan Landry, Tricia Zucker, and Maria Carlo) that examines the combined impacts of classroom intervention and PALS intervention on Spanish-English bilingual development. Dr. Vaughn is leading research on bilingual brain development during childhood and adolescence based on data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Finally, she is involved in ongoing research on neural outcomes of pediatric traumatic brain injury (PI: Linda Ewing-Cobbs).

Publications

Pollatou, A., Filippi, C., Aydin, E., Vaughn, K., Thompson, D., Korom, M. Dufford, A. J., Howell, B., Zöllei, L., Scheinost, D., Di Martino, A., Graham, A., Robinson, E., FIT’NG, Spann, M. (2022). An ode to Fetal, Infant, and Toddler Neuroimaging: Chronicling early clinical to research applications with MRI, and an introduction to an academic society connecting the field. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Korom, M., Camacho, M. C., Filippi, C. A., Licandro, R., Moore, L., Dufford, A., Zöllei, L., Graham, A. M., Spann, M., Howell, B., FIT’NG [including Vaughn, K. A.], Shultz, S., & Scheinost, D. (2022). Dear reviewers: Responses to common reviewer critiques about infant neuroimaging studies. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2021.101055

Vaughn, K. A., DeMaster, D. M., Kook, J. H., Vannucci, M., & Ewing-Cobbs, L. (2021). Effective connectivity in the default mode network after pediatric TBI. European Journal of Neuroscience. doi: 10.1111/ejn.15546

Vaughn, K. A., Nguyen, My, V. H., Ronderos, J. & Hernandez, A. E. (2021). Cortical thickness in bilingual and monolingual children: Relationships to language use and language skill. NeuroImage. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118560

Crawford, A., Vaughn, K. A., Guttentag, C., Varghese, C., Oh, Y., & Zucker, T. A. (2021). “Doing what I can, but I got no magic wand.” A Snapshot of Early Childhood Educator Experiences and Efforts to Ensure Quality During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Early Childhood Education Journal. doi: 10.1007/s10643-021-01215-z

Vaughn, K. A., Watlington, E. M., Linares Abrego, P., Tamber-Rosenau, B., & Hernandez, A. E. (2020). Prefrontal tDCS has a domain-specific impact on bilingual language control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi: 10.1037/xge0000956

Claussenius-Kalman, H. L., Vaughn, K. A., Archila-Suerte, P., & Hernandez, A. E. (2020). Highly proficient, balanced bilingualism is related to the thinner cortex in two cognitive control regions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1111/nyas.14491

Kook, J. H., Vaughn, K. A., DeMaster D., Ewing-Cobbs, L., & Vannucci, M. (2020). BVAR-connect: A variational Bayes approach to multi-subject vector autoregressive models for inference on brain connectivity networks. Neuroinformatics. doi: 10.1007/s12021-020-09472-w

Claussenius-Kalman, H. Vaughn, K. A., Archila-Suerte, P., & Hernandez, A. E. (2019). Age of acquisition impacts the brain differently depending on neuroanatomical metric. Human Brain Mapping. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24817

Curriculum Vitae

Email the Children’s Learning Institute to request a copy.