About
Dr. Laura A. Carlson, a distinguished administrator, educator and researcher with more than 25 years of higher education experience became provost of the University of Delaware in June 2022.
As the University of Delaware’s chief academic officer, Carlson is responsible for the administration and continuous enhancement of all programs of instruction, research and service supporting the academic mission of the University, and for facilitating the success of UD faculty and students.
Her appointment at UD follows a long and robust career at Notre Dame, where she served in several key leadership roles including vice president, associate provost and dean of the Graduate School.
Carlson’s primary research interest is spatial cognition – how we mentally represent the places and objects around us. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work, publishing with scholars across the fields of computer science, engineering, architecture and linguistics. Carlson is the coauthor of Functional features in language and space: Insights from perception, categorization, and development, published by Oxford University Press. Her research regularly appears in top leading refereed journals. She has served as associate editor for three premier journals in cognition. Carlson was elected to the governing boards of both the Cognitive Science Society and the Psychonomic Society, where she is past chair of the governing board. She was also elected a fellow of the Association of Psychological Science in 2012 and has received several teaching awards.
Carlson is a cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College with a special major in psychology of language. She received a Master of Arts degree at Michigan State University and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
