Jamie Edgin

Jamie Edgin is a Psychologist specializing in the area of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Her area of expertise is memory development and sleep in typical and atypical development. Dr. Edgin is the Chair of the Department of Psychology. For her work in the community, she received the University of Arizona's Koffler Prize for Outreach in 2018. She visits parent advocacy groups across the globe, delivering talks in Canada and Mexico. Dr. Edgin's work in the early 2000s was instrumental in characterizing the specific learning/memory profiles (i.e., the individual strengths and weaknesses) of individuals with Down syndrome and autism. For these efforts, she received the 2015 David Cox “Rising Star” Award from the LuMind Foundation and the 2020 Distinguished Contribution to Science Award from the Arizona Psychological Association. Dr. Edgin's most recent work has shown links between sleep problems and cognition in Down syndrome and is the first empirical evidence to suggest that poor sleep may limit how well these individuals can learn to communicate. Dr. Edgin has numerous national and international collaborations, including collaborations with UNAM/Mexico City. In 2014 she was awarded a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations Grant to study sleep disturbance in at-risk infants. She has been continuously funded by the NIH/NICHD through PI led and collaborative grants since 2016. Her more recent work is centered on the intersection of memory science and policy. Dr. Edgin is a first generation college student, born in the upper Appalachian mountains in PA.

Research in the Memory Development and Policy lab is made possible by the generous support of the Foundation Jerome Lejeune, the National Institutes of Health, and through the generous support of donors, including a gift made in memory of Brenda DeSliva.