Our Research Team
Trevor Scarlett
Research Assistant
Trevor received his degree in psychology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Jessica Mattingly
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jessica works in the Oral and Written Language Lab. She graduated with her Ph.D. in Health Sciences from Texas Christian University, her M.S. in speech-language pathology from Vanderbilt University, and her B.A. in speech pathology and audiology from Calvin University. Jessica has over a decade of experience as a pediatric speech-language pathologist–a career that sparked her interest in intervention-based research. She is particularly interested in how integrating movement into intervention can improve language and learning in children with disabilities.
Marren Brooks
Doctoral Research Assistant
Marren works in the OWL lab. She became interested in a research career while working with Dr. Werfel as an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina. Marren received her MS in Speech-Language Pathology at Purdue University and worked as a school SLP before beginning her doctoral studies at the University of South Carolina. As a research assistant, she loves working on the ELLA study and catching up with our participants and their families each summer.
Eddie Okosi
Research Assistant I
Eddie Graduated from the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) in 2022, with a major in Psychology, and a minor in Journalism. Eddie aspires to be a clinical psychologist with an emphasis on sleep in co-morbidity with other conditions. What he loves about working with Dr. Werfel is that even though the team comes from different worlds, they collaborate so well together.
Lee Evans
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lee graduated from the University of Connecticut. His research interests focus on the relationship between auditory processing, language, and cognition. Specifically, he aims to better understand how the brain's ability to neurally encode speech influences language development. Lee enjoys working in the OWL lab because he is able to explore neural encoding in children who are hard of hearing, an area that has not been investigated much to date.
