Deborah P. Waber

Deborah Waber is a developmental neuropsychologist who has carried out extensive research on typically developing children and children with learning disorders with a variety of etiologies, both developmental and secondary to medical illnesses. Her research has contributed substantially to understandings in areas such as information processing in children with diverse problems in learning, long-term effects of childhood cancer and its treatments, and life-span impacts of infantile malnutrition.

Dr. Waber is also a co-investigator on the landmark NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development. She has contributed more than 100 publications in developmental neuropsychology.

Clinically, Dr. Waber directs the Learning Disabilities Program at Boston Children's Hospital, a unique interdisciplinary team that provides assessments for children with complex developmental and neurologically based disorders of learning, cognition and social development.

Dr. Waber is well known for her unique developmental approach to learning disorders, in which she portrays these disorders as complex developmental variations in the whole child than as deficits in specific academic skills. She is the author of Rethinking Learning Disabilities: Understanding Children Who Struggle in School (Guilford Press), which provides an in-depth appreciation of this approach.