McBride, Catherine

Catherine Alexandra McBride (formerly McBride-Chang) is a Professor of Developmental Psychology and the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Health and Human Sciences at Purdue University. She is also an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where she previously held the Choh-Ming Li Professorship of Psychology. McBride specializes in the acquisition of early literacy skills. She received her BA in psychology from Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. She received her MA in 1992 and PhD in 1994 from the University of Southern California, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. She has written two books (namely, Children's Literacy Development (2004; updated 2016) and Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and ADHD: A Global Perspective (2019) and co-edited three others. She is currently the Past-President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR). McBride has served as an associate editor for four journals and authored or coauthored over 230 journal articles. She has also given talks on her work in China, Korea, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Australia, and the United States. She takes a cross-cultural and developmental approach to literacy learning, having published articles on learning to read and to write in many different cultures, languages, and orthographies, including Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and English. She is interested in many constructs believed to be central for learning to read and to write, including segmental and suprasegmental phonological sensitivity, morphological awareness, visual-orthographic skills, visual-motor skills, memory, and fluency. She was the founding president of a new society focused on understanding literacy expertise, development, and impairment in Asia, called the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia.