Katherine E. Travis, Ph.D.

Katherine E. Travis, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and Director of the Laboratory for Language Development and Recovery Burke Neurological Institute.

Dr. Travis received her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience from Colorado College in 2003 and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego in 2011.  Before beginning her graduate studies, Dr. Travis worked as a research assistant at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She performed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University in translational and clinical pediatric neuroscience. In 2016, she was promoted to Instructor and was awarded a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence grant from the National Institutes of Health. In 2019, she joined the faculty at Stanford as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics.

In 2023, Dr. Travis was recruited to the faculty at Burke Neurological Institute and at Weill Cornell Medicine. Her research aims to identify therapies to promote brain, language and cognitive development in children at-risk for learning disabilities. In her work, she uses advanced structural MRI methods, such as diffusion and quantitative T1-mapping, to assess brain development in neonates, infants and children.  Her current work is focused on understanding how sensory experiences and parenting behaviors in the neonatal intensive care unit and home environment contribute to shaping brain and neurocognitive development in children born preterm.