Alison Mackey is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and Chair of the Linguistics Department. She researches how second languages are learned and how they might best be taught. She investigates second language learning across the lifespan, including how additional languages are learned at different ages, looking at both younger and older children, as well as college age, prime-of-life, and elderly adults. One of her primary research interests is research methodology. She has published over 100 articles across all of the top scholarly journals in linguistics, as well as in edited collections by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, John Benjamins and others. She has published 17 books in total, three of which deal with researching children’s language learning and teaching. Her Handbook of Second Language Acquisition , with Sue Gass, won the Mildenberg prize (2012). She is Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge University Press’s Annual Review of Applied Linguistics as well as Editor of the Routledge book series Second Language Research . Google Scholar shows her work has been cited more than 35,000 times in the academic literature and she is currently the highest cited female scholar in the world in applied linguistics (9th highest overall). She is also a winner of the American Association for Applied Linguistics' Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award, and the International Association of Task-based Language Learning and Teaching's Distinguished Achievement Award.