Gertrud L. Wyatt

Gertrud Lasch Wyatt ( Schmidt; October 14, 1903 – November 4, 1993) was an Austrian-born American psychologist and education academic. Originally a radio personality for Radio Wien and a voice theory educator, she was educated at the University of Vienna and was part of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society before fleeing Austria after the Anschluss. After spending a year in London, she settled in Massachusetts, where she was full-time psychologist and director of speech services for Wellesley Public Schools from 1953 and 1974. As an academic, she was a 1965 Guggenheim Fellowship and wrote the 1969 book Language Learning and Communication Disorders in Children. Biography Early life and career in Europe Gertrud Schmidt She eventually ended up in London, where she spent a year studying at the University of London Department of Child Development and working as a research associate at Paddington Green Children's Hospital, before moving to the United States the year after.

In addition to Wellesley Public Schools, she also worked at Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, in both cases as a clinical associate and intern supervisor.

She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965, for "a study of language development and language disorders in children". Known by the Portland Press Herald to have "gained a national reputation for her ability to present her ideas to parents and teachers", she wrote the book Language Learning and Communication Disorders in Children (1969), based on her prior research on language-based learning disabilities with funding from National Institutes of Health. Their only child, Cornelia Wyatt, was a journalist who was part of The New York Times, Town & Country, and Wall Street Journal staff teams, before dying from diabetes complications in 1984. In 1989, she published an autobiography called Mother and Daughter: A Personal Biography.

On November 4, 1993, Wyatt died of congestive heart failure in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she had lived for the past few decades.

Some of her correspondence is part of the Papers of Gordon W. Allport within the Harvard University Archives. Publications Language Learning and Communication Disorders in Children (1969)