Catherine Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from McGill
and worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University
of Amsterdam. Her research interests include children's language development
as influenced by interaction with adults in home and preschool settings, literacy
development as related to language skills and as influenced by home and school
factors, and issues related to the acquisition of English oral and literacy
skills by language minority children. She has co-authored books on language
development (e.g., Pragmatic Development with Anat Ninio) and on literacy
development (e.g., Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on
Literacy, with W. Barnes, J. Chandler, I. Goodman & L. Hemphill), and
published widely on these topics in referred journals and edited volumes.
Snow's contributions to the field include membership on several journal editorial boards, co-directorship for several years of the Child Language Data Exchange System, and editorship of Applied Psycholinguistics. She served as a board member at the Center for Applied Linguistics and a member of the National Research Council Committee on Establishing a Research Agenda on Schooling for Language Minority Children. She chaired the National Research Council Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which produced a report that has been widely adopted as a basis for reform of reading instruction and professional development. She currently serves on the NRC's Council for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and as president of the American Educational Research Association.
A member of the National Academy of Education, Snow has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge, England, Universidad Autonoma in Madrid, and The Institute of Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has guest taught at Universidad Central de Caracas, El Colegio de Mexico, Odense University in Denmark, and several institutions in The Netherlands.