Keynote Lecture: Carol Padden

Carol Padden

Sunday, September 14, 2025, 9:00 – 10:00 am, Elstad Auditorium

Speaker: Carol Padden, PhD., University of California, San Diego

About Carol Padden

Carol Padden joined the faculty at University of California, San Diego in the Department of Communication in 1983, after earning a Ph.D. from the university’s Department of Linguistics. She holds the Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication and has served as associate dean and faculty equity advisor in the School of Social Sciences from 2008 to 2013. In 2014, she became the Dean and leads a dynamic and highly ranked School spanning 11 academic departments and 5 interdisciplinary programs. Padden’s areas of research include language emergence and sign language structure. With her husband, Professor Tom Humphries, she is a co-author of 2 textbooks on American Sign Language and 2 books on deaf communities in the US. She is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.