Dr. Krista Byers Heinlein

Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University, where she holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science and directs the Concordia Infant Research Lab. Her research focuses on infants and children who grow up in bilingual environments. She has made notable discoveries about how very young bilinguals discriminate and differentiate their two languages, how children are able to learn words in two languages to build their vocabularies, and how parents interact with their bilingual children to support their development. She is also active in efforts to improve psychological science, working to improve methods, increase transparency, build large-scale collaborations in the field, and promote equity and inclusion for under-represented groups. She recently shared the Society for Improvement of Psychological Science Mission Award for improving psychological science in the face of challenge, in the context of her leadership role in a large-scale collaborative project called ManyBabies, which involved 70 labs worldwide that collected experimental data from more than 2000 infants.

Dr. Byers-Heinlein has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Psychological Science, Child Development, Developmental Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2018, with Dr. François Grosjean, she published her first book, entitled The listening bilingual: Speech perception, comprehension, and bilingualism. Her research has been supported by over 2.9 million dollars CAD in direct costs from grating agencies including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, les Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture, and National Institutes of Health (USA). Her research is often featured in print and broadcast media, including Global TV, CBC Radio, Psychology Today, PBS, the Globe and Mail, and the New York Times.