Rate My Professor Aydin Durgunoglu

Aydin Durgunoglu is a Distinguished Global Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota Duluth, College of Education and Human Service Professions, where she taught from 1993 to 2020 and served as interim department head. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Cognitive Psychology from Purdue University, as well as a B.S. in Psychology from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research focuses on cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, bilingual reading and literacy development, adult literacy, and content-integrated language instruction for English learners.

Durgunoglu developed a national adult literacy program for the Turkish Ministry of Education in 1995, reaching nearly 200,000 adults across 17 provinces; this initiative received UNESCO's literacy prize in 2005 and the Emerging Markets Foundation’s EMpower award in 2013. As principal investigator for the CILIA-T project (Content-Integrated Language Instruction for Adults with Technology Support), she secured a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to create a curriculum on U.S. history and civics that integrates academic vocabulary, comprehension, critical thinking, and digital literacy skills for intermediate and advanced adult English learners. Her scholarly contributions include dozens of journal articles and 12 book chapters, such as 'Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness' (Journal of Educational Psychology, 1993, with W.E. Nagy and B.J. Hancin-Bhatt), editorship of 'Literacy Development in a Multilingual Context: Cross-Cultural Perspectives' (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998, with L. Verhoeven), 'A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition' (Reading and Writing, 1999, with B. Oney), and 'Reading from Screen Vs Reading from Paper: Does It Really Matter?' (Journal of Research in Reading, 2022, with T. Ocal). She has earned the University of Minnesota Award for Global Engagement (2013), UMD Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award (2011), and serves as associate editor of Applied Psycholinguistics. Durgunoglu has consulted nationally and internationally on reading, literacy, and bilingualism, developed a virtual global classroom linking UMD with universities in Uganda and Sweden, and contributed to committees of the National Academy of Sciences, advancing bilingual education and cognitive psychology worldwide.