Dr. Mandy Maguire, associate professor of speech, language, and hearing, has been named director of The University of Texas at Dallas Center for Children and Families (CCF), which provides research and training for students in developmental science in addition to service to local children and families.
Maguire succeeds founding director and Robinson Family Professor Dr. Margaret Owen, professor of psychology and interim dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS).
Maguire, who joined UT Dallas in 2005, is also on the faculty of the Callier Center for Communication Disorders.
“CCF is a link between ‘ivory tower’ science and making an impact in the lives of children,” Maguire said. “The director builds the connections between research, outreach and student training in a way that maximizes the benefits of all three, so that our research has more real-world implications; the students get real-world training; and the science improves based on that experience.”
Owen, who has served as CCF director since 2009, said she has “every confidence that the center is in excellent hands” with Maguire.
“Dr. Maguire is widely known for her passion and many efforts to support and encourage research careers among students. She is equally impassioned about applying science to address needs in the wider community,” Owen said. “She is strongly committed to broadening the relevance of developmental and speech-language-hearing sciences and expanding the fields’ scientists to include those from a wider scope of backgrounds, skills and experiences.”
Maguire’s father was a social work professor, and Maguire grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Pittsburgh. She said she knew from an early age that she wanted to help young people.
“In my neighborhood, there were a lot of children from homes without a lot of resources who had huge potential but fell behind — not because of intelligence or motivation, but because of barriers to resources,” she said. “My goal was to use science in a way to improve their lives. I wanted to have a genuine impact on as many people as I could.”
She received her PhD in developmental psychology from Temple University in Philadelphia, then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Louisville before accepting her first faculty position at UTD. Her current research uses neuroscience to examine how typically developing children learn language and how poverty affects language acquisition.
“Writing those research papers, however, didn’t make me feel like I was having the impact I sought,” Maguire said. “As I became more involved with CCF, I saw the amazing work that Dr. Owen was doing, finding ways to use science to enter the community and work with families and children to make lives better. Then, she uses her experiences in the community to feed back into her science.”
This model drove Maguire’s work as the principal investigator on a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program that began in 2021, facilitated by a National Science Foundation grant.
“This REU helped me learn more about how CCF’s three pillars — research, student training and outreach — go together. We create that cycle of real-world student training helping the community, then feed back into research,” she said. “We can continue to build CCF with programs like these.”
“Dr. Maguire is widely known for her passion and many efforts to support and encourage research careers among students. She is equally impassioned about applying science to address needs in the wider community.”
Dr. Margaret Owen, interim dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Maguire argues that developmental research must expand both in terms of what populations are studied and who is performing the research.
“Our scientists and the populations we study must become more diverse. Our understanding of child development has been myopic because the research has been homogeneous,” she said. “We are well poised for this transition at CCF, because of the networks we have within the community and because our scientists understand that this is the direction the field is moving.”
Maguire praised Owen as having placed CCF as a leader in the shift in research to emphasize providing benefits to the community.
“The outreach programs and networks she’s created within the community are amazing,” Maguire said. “She has garnered so much respect locally for the work she does. On top of all that, her science is truly groundbreaking and has been for decades. She is at the forefront of doing work and giving a voice to people who do not have one.”
CCF was founded in 2008 by developmental psychologists in BBS with support from a three-year, $350,000 matching grant from the Meadows Foundation.