Judy Anne Shepard-Kegl :::
Judy Anne Shepard-Kegl
Graduated in 1971
Inducted in 1996
Judy Anne Shepard-Kegl, class of 1971, is a neuroscientist at Rutgers University. Dr. Kegl studies the effects of brain damage from strokes or Parkinson's disease on people's ability to use and understand language. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Brown University and her doctoral degree in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is researching the syntactic structure of American Sign Language and developing a CD-ROM database for the coding and analysis of American Sign Language. She serves on the Board of Directors of Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc., a non-profit corporation established to operate and fund sign language projects in Nicaragua. For the past decade she has documented the emergence of anew signed language indigenous to the Nicaraguan Deaf population. Her studies have been reported in various scientific literature. In addition, Dr. Kegl has helped establish a school for Deaf children in Bluefields, Nicaragua. Her immersion program transplants fluent deaf adults from the urban centers into the Bluefields Deaf community. The program has become a teaching model for language workshops throughout that nation.