Rita G. Rudel-Lucy G. Moses Lecture
Lecture History
This lecture was established by one of New York City’s great benefactors, Lucy G. Moses, to honor the memory of Dr. Rita G. Rudel. Dr. Rudel suffered an untimely death on May 21, 1984 at the height of her academic career. At the time, she was Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Director of the Neuropsychology Unit at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Rudel had gained wide recognition for her neuropsychological investigations of neurologically impaired and developmentally learningdisabled children and was an editor of the Journal of Learning Disabilities.
Dr. Rudel received her bachelor’s degree from City College and her master’s degree from New York University. She became a member of the Department of Psychology at MIT in 1961. Over the next decade, a productive collaboration emerged between Dr. Rudel and her mentor, Professor Hans Teuber. Together they investigated many aspects of cognitive function in normal and brain-injured children.
Dr. Rudel returned to NYC in 1972 as a member of Columbia’s Department of Neurology. She later also joined the Department of Psychiatry. She continued her professional collaboration with Dr. Teuber in Boston even as she joined forces with Dr. Martha B. Denckla in New York. A stream of important neuropsychological studies emerged. Particularly novel aspects were Dr. Rudel’s emphasis, first, on providing quantitative measures of children with neurological disabilities and, second, developing new management strategies to help them cope with learning disabilities and hyperactivity. For their innovative work, Drs. Rudel and Denckla shared Columbia’s 1975 Lucy G. Moses Prize for Research in Clinical Neurology.
2025 Lecture Information:
Thinking about Autism at the Cognitive Level: Past, Present and Future (with Examples from Language Comprehension)
Date: June 18, 2025
Time: 5-6 PM
Location: Neurological Institute Auditorium, 710 West 168th Street, 1st Floor
Jesse Snedeker, PhD
Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
Jesse Snedeker received her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and then joined the Laboratory of Developmental Studies at Harvard University where she is currently a Professor of Psychology. Her group explores language development, language creation, comprehension, production, and linguistic representation in a variety of populations including typically developing children, people with autism, and children who were internally adopted. Her laboratory employs a variety of methodologies, including EEG, eye-tracking, corpus analysis, and behavioral experiments. The work is characterized by a focus on the different levels of representation implicated in language use and how information interacts across these levels.
For further information, contact thb2108@cumc.columbia.edu.