A life of research leads to a University Killam Professorship

Dr. Janet Werker began her long, prolific research and teaching career at UBC in 1985. Throughout her entire academic career, she has managed multiple roles at once. Not only is she a teaching professor and researcher who is director of the Infant Studies Centre in the Department of Psychology, she is also the one of the founders and co-chair of the UBC-wide Language Sciences initiative.
Now Werker is one of six academics at UBC honoured with a Killam Professorship. The distinction of University Killam Professor is the highest honour UBC can bestow on a faculty member.
Dr. Werker, a Canada Research Chair in Psychology, is one of the world’s leading developmental psychologists. Through her research she explores the foundations of language learning, including multi-language acquisition in infancy.
To to be recognized by her home university, a university she loves and where she has built the foundation of her research, is an honour for Werker. “I am so pleased to receive the University Killam Professorship,” says Werker. “I’m also proud of the esteem with which Psychology and the broader Faculty of Arts at UBC are held.”
Her awards and commendations are as lengthy as her career. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research, the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Psychological Association, The American Psychological Association, The American Psychological Society, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her awards include the Anne L. Brown Award in Developmental Psychology, the Jacob Biely Prize, the UBC Alumni Prize in Social Sciences, the Killam Research Prize, and the SSHRC Gold Medal.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Werker on receiving this distinction.
To learn more about the Killam legacy at UBC, please visit Killam Awards + Fellowships.