**Carol Padden**

Carol Padden's research focuses on the structure and evolution of sign languages and cultural life in deaf communities. Over the last 20 years, Padden and her research colleagues have studied an emergen<sup>t</sup> sign language that continues to be used today by deaf and hearing Bedouins in Al-Sayyid, a village in the Negev in southern Israel. Padden and her husband, Tom Humphries, co-authored two landmark books in sign languages and deaf studies, *Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture* (1988) and *Inside Deaf Culture* (2005), and two textbooks on American Sign Language for students in high schools and universities around the country. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992 and she holds two honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa, Israel in 2015, and Swarthmore College in 2016. As Dean of the School of Social Sciences, she oversees 11 departments, 5 programs and several Centers which carry out research on educational equity, social mobility, immigration policy and post-civil-rights Black Studies. An advocate for deaf communities, Padden is active in promoting research on sign languages around the world and in shaping policy and practices that advance the full participation of deaf people in society.
