Nan Bernstein Ratner is Professor, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park. She is a Fellow and Honors recipient of the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association (ASHA). In 2014, she was made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

 Her primary areas of research are fluency development and disorder (stuttering), psycholinguistics and the role of adult input and interaction in child language development. The author of numerous research articles, chapters and edited texts, she is the co-author of the recently-released A Handbook on Stuttering (7th ed) with the late Oliver Bloodstein and Shelley B. Brundage, as well as The Development of Language (7th ed) and Psycholinguistics (2nd ed.), both with Jean Berko Gleason. She is a Board-recognized Specialist in Child Language Disorders. In 2006, Professor Bernstein Ratner received the Distinguished Researcher award from the International Fluency Association, for which she has served as President. In 2016, Dr. Bernstein Ratner was named Professional of the Year by the National Stuttering Association. 

With Brian MacWhinney of Carnegie-Mellon University, Dr. Bernstein Ratner manages FluencyBank (http://fluency.talkbank.org/), a project of TalkBank (https://talkbank.org/). This initiative, jointly funded by the NIDCD and NSF,  tracks fluency development in typical children, those who stutter, late-talking children and children raised bilingually. In addition, FluencyBank seeks to archive and facilitate sharing of data relevant to fluency research. Since August 2018, Dr. Bernstein Ratner has been spearheading a five-year project, also funded by the NIDCD, to re-evaluate measures used in assessment of children's spoken and written language samples (Language Sample Analysis/LSA), and to create algorithms for bias-free assessment of samples from children who speak non-mainstream dialects of American English. In 2023, Dr. Bernstein Ratner received funding from the NIH initiative Tackling Language Acquisition in Kids (TALK) to examine possible predictors of recovery from late-talking in early childhood.

Dr. Bernstein Ratner also publishes in the areas of Evidence-Based Practice in Communication Disorders. Many of her research articles on child language acquisition/disorders and fluency can be found at Google Scholar:  http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Nan+Bernstein+Ratner&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2… 

Dr. Bernstein Ratner is a member of the following campus units:

Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience (NACS): http://www.nacs.umd.edu/ (currently, Director of Graduate Studies)

Language Sciences Center (LSC): http://languagescience.umd.edu/ 

University of Maryland Autism Research Consortium: http://autism.umd.edu (co-Director)

University of Maryland Developmental Sciences Field Committee

Bahá’í Chair for World Peace International Advisory Board

Visit Dr. Bernstein Ratner's LAB WEB SITE at http://languagefluency.umd.edu/

Dr. Bernstein Ratner is currently accepting doctoral students. Interested students should contact her as early as possible. No HESP PhD students are accepted without prior discussions with the student's intended mentor(s).