People

Director

Prof. Jessica Kotfila, Linguistics

Faculty Steering Committee

Faculty In Cognitive Science

Prof. Rachel Barr, Psychology
Her research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of learning and memory that develop during infancy.

Prof. Heidi Byrnes, German
Her research, scholarship, and teaching focus on adult-instructed second language acquisition, particularly at the very advanced level.

Prof. Wayne A. Davis, Philosophy
His research interests are centered in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and logic, and are focused mainly on the nature of mental states (particularly belief, desire, and thought) and the concept of meaning.

Prof. Rhonda Dzakpasu, Physics and Pharmacology
Her research investigates how excitatory-inhibitory balance modulates the self-organization of in vitro neural circuitry.

Prof. Guinevere Eden, Pediatrics
Her research focus is in neuroscience, particularly developmental dyslexia. Her work focuses on characterizing visual processing in individuals with and without dyslexia using fMRI and in extending this approach to other sensory domains, such as sensorimotor control.

Prof. Rhonda Friedman, Neurology
Her research focuses on deficits in language and cognition in adult neurologic patients with stroke, head injury and dementia.

Prof. Adam Green, Psychology
His research focuses on the neural and molecular genetic processes that underlie human intelligence.

Prof. Jeff Huang, Biology
His research aims to understand the mechanisms of glia-neuron interaction, with the goal to devise regenerative and neuroprotective therapies for brain pathologies that occur with aging, injury and disease.

Prof. Bryce Huebner, Philosophy
His research and teaching cover a host of interdisciplinary questions at the boundaries of philosophy and psychology. Most of his work focuses on issues of cognitive architecture (especially the architecture of the moral mind) and the ethical dimensions of having the sort of cognitive architecture that we do.

Prof. Paul Kainen, Mathematics
His research interests include topology and geometry of nonlinear approximation (especially in regard to neural networks), theoretical biology (i.e., mathematical notions that may be somehow relevant), and quantum computation and graph theory.

Prof. Jagmeet S. Kanwal, Neuroscience
He studies the functional organization of the brain and the neural coding of sensory information.

Prof. Ruth Kramer, Linguistics
Her research interests are primarily in morphological and syntactic theory, with a particular focus on the morphosyntax of noun phrases, and working on Afroasiatic languages.

Prof. Steve Kuhn, Philosophy
His research interests include logic, philosophy of logic, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.

Prof. Donna Lardiere, Linguistics
Her research interests include language acquisition, second language acquisition, morphological and syntactic theory, and developmental linguistics.

Prof. Ronald P. Leow, Spanish & Portuguese
His research interests include: teacher education, SLA, psycholinguistics, attention and awareness, and technology in learning.

Prof. David Lightfoot, Linguistics
His research interests include syntactic theory, language acquisition and historical change.

Prof. Alison Mackey, Linguistics
Her major research interests include: second language acquisition, in particular, input and interaction, the roles of attention and working memory in second language development; and second language research methodology.

Prof. Abigail A. Marsh, Psychology
Her research assesses neural substrates and behavioral outcomes related to facets of emotion, with a focus on empathy, altruism, aggression, and nonverbal communication.

Prof. Mark Maloof, Computer Science
His research interests include machine learning, data mining, online learning algorithms, concept drift, adaptive software systems, and applications of machine learning and data mining to computer security.

Prof. Janet Mann, Psychology and Biology
Her main interests are in ethological methods, mother-infant relationships and infant development in cetaceans and primates, evolution, and behavioral ecology.

Prof. John Mikhail, Law and Philosophy
His research interests include moral cognition and intuitions of justice and fairness.

Prof. Fathali M. Moghaddam, Psychology
His research focuses on the cognitive and cultural foundations of political behavior.

Prof. Elissa Newport, Neurology

Her research focuses on language acquisition, the relationship between language acquisition and language structure, and recovery of language after damage to the brain in early life.

Prof. Paul Portner, Linguistics
His research covers semantics, pragmatics, and the syntax/semantics interface.

Prof. Josef Rauschecker, Neuroscience
His interest is in the functional organization and plasticity of the cerebral cortex.

Prof. Maximilian Riesenhuber, Neuroscience
His interest is in computational models, psychophysics and fMRI of high-level vision, in particular object recognition, object representation, and attention.

Prof. Cristina Sanz, Spanish & Portuguese
Her focus is the acquisition of second languages and the relationship between bilingualism and cognition.

Prof. Pamela A. Saunders, Neurology
Her research is on communication, aging and Alzheimer’s disease, including doctor-patient communication in the older patient population.

Prof. Nathan, Schneider, Linguistics

His research addresses the semantics of natural language text, examining both how humans can represent meaning computationally, and how algorithms can recover meaning from text for scientific inquiry and for natural language processing applications

Prof. Michael Ullman, Neuroscience
He investigates the neural and psychological bases of language, and the relations between language, memory, and motor functions.

Prof. Jeffrey Urbach, Physics
His research involves imaging dynamical phenomena in physical systems.

Prof. Chandan J. Vaidya, Psychology
Her research focuses on understanding the cognitive and neural underpinnings of memory and cognitive control.

Prof. Mahendran Velauthapillai, Computer Science
His research focuses on learning theory, bioinformatics, protein linguistics, networks, and online algorithms.

Prof. Amir Zeldes, Linguistics

He specializes in work on and with corpora, including corpus linguistics studies, building corpora, and creating annotation interfaces and NLP tools. His research focuses on computational models of discourse.

Prof. Elizabeth Zsiga, Linguistics
Her research interests include phonological theory, second language phonology, phonetics (especially articulatory), speech synthesis, and the phonology/phonetics interface.