Anastasia Stoops

Anastasia Stoops is a Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, within the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She maintains multiple institutional affiliations including the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (NCSA) and the Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine department at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria.

Her research program focuses on:

• Language Learning and Reading Development
• Computational Modeling of visual and linguistic factors
• Neuroscience of Visual Cognition
• Attention and Perception in Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology aspects of reading

Dr. Stoops' recent publications demonstrate a strong interdisciplinary approach combining experimental methods like eye-tracking and EEG with computational modeling to investigate reading processes across different age groups and languages. Her work on naturalistic picture book reading with young children has created valuable resources for the field, including the Stoops-Montag corpus comprising 183 book reading episodes from 12 families.

Her notable recognition includes:

• Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 2021-2022
• Facebook, Global Literacy and Accessibility Challenge Research Award, 2018

Dr. Stoops actively mentors students through the Student Pushing Innovation (SPIN) fellowship and Undergraduate Research Symposium since 2020, with many mentees receiving competitive awards. Her current funding includes the Jump ARCHES 'Voice Vitals' project as collaborator and an NSF grant as co-PI on understanding eye movements in readers.

She leads the Learning and Language Lab (LeLaLab), where her team investigates reading development through computational analyses of naturalistic environments, experimental methods, and computational modeling of visual-linguistic interactions.