Sally Shaywitz

Sally Shaywitz (born 1942) is an American physician-scientist who is the Audrey G. Ratner Professor in Learning Development at Yale University. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. Her research provides the framework for modern understanding of dyslexia.

Early life and education Shaywitz was born and raised in The Bronx. She is the daughter of two Eastern European immigrants. She was accepted early to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Research and career Shaywitz started her medical career seeing patients out of her home in suburban Connecticut. Her research involves longitudinal epidemiological and neurobiological studies. In 1983 she started tracking a random cohort of children continuously from kindergarten to their current age in their 40s. She showed that boys and girls were equally as likely to be affected by dyslexia. These studies allowed Shaywitz to identify a neural signature of dyslexia, as well as demonstrating that dyslexia is not simply a reading disorder young people 'outgrow'. In 2020 she, together with her son, psychiatrist, Jonathan Shaywitz, published the much updated Overcoming Dyslexia 2nd edition.

Awards and honors 1995 Albert Einstein College of Medicine Distinguished Alumnus Award 1998 Elected member of the National Academy of Medicine 1998 Society for Women's Health Research Achievement Award in Women's Health 2003 Margot Marek Book Award 2004 City College of New York Townsend Harris Medal 2005 Williams College Honorary Doctor of Science degree 2012 Samuel Torrey Orton Award (jointly with Bennett Shaywitz) 2017 Liberty Science Center Genius Award 2020 Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Selected publications As of 2018, the definition of dyslexia as unexpected is codified in U.S. federal law (U.S. Public Law 115-391): The term “dyslexia” means an unexpected difficulty in reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader, most commonly caused by a difficulty in the phonological processing (the appreciation of the individual sounds of spoken language), which affects the ability of an individual to speak, read, and spell.

Personal life Shaywitz is married to Bennett Shaywitz, a pediatric neurologist who headed that section at Yale from 1976 to 2015 and with whom she co-founded the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. They met and were married in 1963.