Laurie E. Cutting, a pioneering educational neuroscientist devoted to unlocking the mysteries of brain function in learning, has been named the 2025 SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner from Vanderbilt University. The annual award honors faculty members from each of the 16 SEC universities for dedication to advancing academic excellence through teaching, innovation and service.
“I am delighted to congratulate Laurie Cutting on this recognition. Her contributions as a scientist, an academic leader and as a mentor to many up-and-coming scholars make her uniquely worthy of this honor. Vanderbilt can be proud,” said Camilla P. Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Peabody.
Cutting’s research portfolio spans multiple disciplines, bridging cognitive, educational and neurobiological perspectives to gain greater understanding of language processing, reading development, learning disabilities and more. With use of state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques, her studies bring crucial insights into evidence-based interventions to support those with reading challenges.
Cutting is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Neuroscience and professor of special education at Peabody College of education and human development. She has additional appointments across the university in the departments of pediatrics, psychology, radiology and electrical and computer engineering.
In 2023, Cutting was appointed associate provost in the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation, where she leads efforts to build scientific discovery across medicine and social sciences. She also promotes commercialization of Vanderbilt’s intellectual property.
Cutting played a key role in launching the nation’s first doctoral program in educational neuroscience at Vanderbilt. She is associate director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center and director of the Education and Brain Sciences Research Lab at Peabody.
Cutting offers hands-on research experience to undergraduate students through the Neuroscience Training Program and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. Undergraduates work directly on studies related to reading disabilities, executive function and child development. Through her studies, she also helps students gain valuable field experience, which includes tutoring struggling readers from the Nashville community.
At the graduate level, Cutting has provided research experiences for more than 130 master’s students and mentored or helped mentor more than 25 doctoral students. She also has guided more than 25 postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty members.
Cutting’s passion for helping children with reading challenges began when she took a year off from college and worked as a teacher’s aide in three first-grade classrooms. She observed very bright students who struggled to read while others seemed to “magically” glean the process. Cutting went on to earn a doctorate in communication sciences and disorders from Northwestern University. She was on faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and at the Kennedy Krieger Institute before joining Vanderbilt in 2009.
“When you want to study something as complex as the brain and how it relates to development and cognition, you need to employ different strategies and techniques,” Cutting said. “Vanderbilt provides the freedom for me to innovate—working with colleagues in education, medicine, psychology and more—and I’m grateful for this recognition.”
In 2018, she received a $3 million National Institutes of Health MERIT Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to deepen understanding on how neural networks associated with reading, math and executive function interact to predict academic outcomes and response to intervention. Other honors include the Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor Award and the Women in Cognitive Science Leadership Award. She was named a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2022.
Cutting has served on and chaired multiple university committees, and she is an adviser to the Roberts Academy and Center for Dyslexia at Vanderbilt.
In addition to launching innovative initiatives with Vanderbilt colleagues, Cutting has collaborated with researchers at other SEC institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville and University of Missouri.
