She is the director of the Language Learning Laboratory at the College of Staten Island of City University of New York and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center where she serves as the Deputy Executive Officer of the PhD program in Psychology.
Brooks received her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University where she worked on clinical research with aphasic patients.
Brooks maintains an active line of research where she publishes on language learning in typical and atypical child development and autism spectrum disorders.
[1] Brooks's dissertation work demonstrated that children between 5–10 years of age struggle to correctly apply universal quantifiers such as "all" and "each".
She uses a variety of methodologies including experiments, parent-child conversational analysis, and meta-analysis to explore developmental processes throughout the lifespan in language acquisition and pedagogy.