Sharlene Newman

Sharlene Newman is a cognitive neuroscientist and psychology professor at the University of Alabama. She uses magnetic resonance imaging to analyze human neurocognition. Her work has focused on functional distinctions between brain regions with sentence comprehension.

Newman was one of the first to use neuroimaging techniques to analyze language processing, which has helped identify which parts of the brain are involved in linguistic functioning. She has also used neuroimaging to understand executive function, addiction, psychopathology, and mathematical and spatial processing.

Newman is the executive director of the Alabama Life Research Institute, an organization that works with rural communities in Alabama, aiming to provide access to health care.

She holds a bachelor’s of engineering in electrical engineering and mathematics from Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Alabama, Birmingham.