Rachel
Reetzke
,
PhD, CCC-SLP
716 North Broadway
Baltimore, MD 21205
United States
About
Dr. Rachel Reetzke is director of the EEG Core and the Brain and Behavioral Development Lab (BBDL), as well as a faculty member in the Center for Autism Services, Science and Innovation (CASSITM) and the Center for Movement Studies at Kennedy Krieger Institute. She is also an associate professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Education
Dr. Reetzke graduated with a B.S. in Communication Disorders and Leadership Studies from the Mahurin Honors College at Western Kentucky University. Prior to starting graduate school, she studied applied linguistics at the University of Cambridge as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar and Visiting Student. As a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Research Scholar, she then conducted research on communication development in autistic children growing up in bilingual environments at the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.
Dr. Reetzke earned her M.A. in Speech-Language Pathology and her Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was an American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholar. Before joining Kennedy Krieger, Dr. Reetzke completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California Davis MIND Institute, where she was a Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) postdoctoral trainee.
Awards and Honors
Dr. Reetzke is a 2023 recipient of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Early Career Contributions in Research Award, which recognizes significant research contributions by scholars in the early stages of their careers.
Research Summary
As a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist, Dr. Reetzke's research questions are grounded in her clinical work with children and their families. Given the complexities of child development, Dr. Reetzke's program of research is highly interdisciplinary spanning the fields of communication sciences and disorders, psychology, neuroscience, engineering, and public health. Leveraging behavioral, electrophysiological, and novel machine learning approaches, Dr. Reetzke's research focuses on (a) characterizing early behavioral phenotypes and developmental trajectories and (b) identifying early predictors of neurotypical and neurodivergent development in infants at elevated likelihood for and toddlers with autism. The long-term goal of this work is to inform the development of cost-effective, scalable, objective outcome measures and to elucidate optimal mechanistic targets and timing for early intervention.
Dr. Reetzke's work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Autism Research Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, Kennedy Krieger's Goldstein Innovation Grant, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Wendy Klag Center for Autism & Developmental Disabilities Pilot Grant.