Sports Neurobiology

Dr. Steven Small | University of Texas at Dallas 

Dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Aage and Margareta Møller Distinguished Professor in Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Dr. Steven Small was appointed as the dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences in spring 2019.

Small has previously served as the chair of the University of California, Irvine Department of Neurology and as director and chief scientific officer of the UC Irvine School of Medicine’s Medical Innovation Institute. Prior to that, he was a professor in the departments of neurology and psychology at the University of Chicago, where he retains professor emeritus status.

Small’s work focuses on understanding the anatomy and physiology of the human brain and its relation to function. His research involves direct investigation of human subjects, particularly in speech and language, and clinical and fundamental neurobiological aspects of mild traumatic brain injuries like concussions, particularly in sports.

“The crux of my work is neurobiology of language. Since I started in computer science, I wanted to know the implementation details,” Small said. “My scientific goal for the school is to bring neuroscience, psychology, and speech and hearing sciences together to build some big projects looking at development across the lifespan.”

Small served as editor-in-chief of the journal Brain and Language from 2005 to early 2019. He is the founder and first president of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language and received its first Distinguished Career Award in 2018. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Neurological Association.

Small, who holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park and a medical degree from the University of Rochester, started his career building computational models of language processing before moving to the direct investigation of human subjects with brain imaging. His work in the neurobiology of language has taken a network approach, emphasizing the multifactorial relation between behavior and brain regions and connections.