Rate My Professor Fumiko Hoeft

Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, serves as Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut and as Campus Dean and Chief Administrative Officer of UConn Waterbury. She holds additional professorships by courtesy in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Educational Psychology, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Pediatrics, and Psychiatry. Dr. Hoeft earned her MD from Keio University School of Medicine in 1995 and her PhD in Neuroscience/Neurophysiology from the same institution in 2003. Her training includes a residency in Neuropsychiatry at Keio University, research fellowships at Harvard Medical School Department of Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine Brain Mapping Center and California Institute of Technology Division of Biology, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at Stanford University Department of Psychology. Before joining UConn, she was Associate Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, held various research and faculty positions at Stanford University School of Medicine from 2005 to 2013, served as Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories, and was adjunct faculty at Keio University School of Medicine.

As a neurophysiologist and systems and developmental cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Hoeft investigates neurobiological mechanisms underlying individual differences in brain maturational processes, literacy acquisition, dyslexia, and related skills using neuroimaging techniques. She directs the Laboratory for Learning Engineering and Neural Systems (brainLENS), a collaboration between UConn and the University of California, San Francisco, and co-founded the Haskins Global Literacy Hub. Her prolific research output includes over 200 publications with more than 18,450 citations, featuring key papers such as "Neural systems predicting long-term outcome in dyslexia" (PNAS, 2011), "Functional and morphometric brain dissociation between dyslexia and reading ability" (PNAS, 2007), "Neural basis of dyslexia: a comparison between dyslexic children and non-dyslexic children equated for reading ability" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2006), and "The neural noise hypothesis of developmental dyslexia" (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2017). Dr. Hoeft has received major awards including the Samuel Torrey Orton Award from the International Dyslexia Association (2014, 2022), Science Educator Award from the Society for Neuroscience (2018), award from the Learning & the Brain Foundation (2015), Eye-to-Eye Academic Excellence Award (2019), and recognition from the University of Connecticut College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (2021). She has contributed to boards of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Bay Area Discovery Museum’s Center for Childhood Creativity, and International Dyslexia Association, as well as editorial boards including Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.