Gooden’s past leadership contributions at Pitt include six years as chair of the Department of Linguistics (2012-2018) and extensive contributions to faculty engagement in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. She collaborates with linguistics faculty as well as the School of Medicine, the School of Education and the David Berg Center as part of the Humanities in Health group.
During her tenure as chair of the Department of Linguistics, she worked with faculty to increase the number of women in the tenure stream. In addition, she led in reorganizing and overhauling department research infrastructure to expand the experimental and computational methods capabilities, while also providing support for teaching-related research for appointment-stream faculty.
Gooden received her BA in linguistics from the University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica) in 1996 and an MA and PhD in linguistics from The Ohio State University in 2003. Her peer-reviewed publications include journal articles, edited volumes, edited special issues of top linguistics journals, high profile conference proceedings and invited articles in prestigious handbooks.
Gooden sees her appointment as “being an integral part of efforts to sustain a research environment that encourages creativity, collaboration and community throughout the University.”
Gooden is married and is the mother of two young children.
