Catherine E. Snow

Who is Catherine E. Snow?

Catherine Elizabeth Snow is an educational psychologist and applied linguist. In 2009 Snow was appointed to the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professorship in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, having previously held the Henry Lee Shattuck Professorship also in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Snow is past president of the American Educational Research Association. She chaired the RAND Corporation 'reading study group' from 1999.

Snow has contributed significantly to theories of bilingualism and language acquisition through parent-child interaction. With Brian MacWhinney, Snow founded the Child Language Data Exchange System database, a corpus of children's speech used by numerous language acquisition researchers. More recently, Snow's research has focused on early childhood literacy, investigating linguistic and social factors that contribute to or detract from literacy. With Anat Ninio, Snow published extensively on pragmatic development.

She is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA, a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.