Dr. Newport received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. She was a member of the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty at the University of Rochester, where she was the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and served as the Chair of the Department for 12 years.
She joined the faculty at Georgetown University in 2012, where she is the director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery and the George Bergeron Professor of Neurology, Rehabilitation Medicine, Psychology, and Linguistics.
Dr. Newport has been recognized by a number of organizations for the impact of her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of language acquisition. She has been elected as a fellow in the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation, and the Packard Foundation. She has received the William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research from the Association for Psychological Science and the Norman A. Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Experimental Psychology. In 2015 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science and in 2020 she received the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
Dr. Newport runs the Learning and Development Lab, which studies the acquisition of language, the relationship between language acquisition and language structure, and the Pediatric Stroke Research Project, which studies the recovery of language after damage to the brain early in life.