Meet Our Providers

Dr. Tanaka has a long-standing passion for working with children and their families to help children reach their maximal potential and improve their quality of life. Her work empowers parents to understand their child as a whole (both strengths and weaknesses) and she provides personalized recommendations for how their child can use their strengths to best address challenges. She is a licensed clinical psychologist who practices in both California and Arizona.

Dr. Tanaka has a keen interest in learning disabilities. Her research has helped improve our understanding of the brain basis of dyslexia for poor readers (Tanaka, Black, et al. 2011), and she has also written for the International Dyslexia Association to help improve awareness of dyslexia-like brain activity in average readers with discrepantly high IQ (Tanaka & Hoeft 2017).

During graduate school, Dr. Tanaka gained extensive clinical training in neuropsychology and neurodevelopment at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford University, the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital – Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorder Clinic, the UCSF Brain Laboratory for Educational NeuroScience (BrainLENS), and Kaiser Oakland Medical Center. Dr. Tanaka completed an APA-accredited internship in neuropsychology at the Barrow Neurological Institute at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Palo Alto University. She then completed her two-year pediatric neuropsychology fellowship at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta / Emory University (an APPCN member program).

Dr. Tanaka is currently a neuropsychologist at Banner–Diamond Children’s Medical Center and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Arizona. After her son was born, she switched to working part-time so that she could travel with her son and husband (who works with researchers around the world). She often visits family, friends, and research collaborators in the Bay Area, during which times she practices with Merit Psychology Group.