Current Team
Graduate Students, Research Staff, Research Assistants
Masato Nakamura
PhD Student
Masato joined us after completing a BA in linguistics at the University of Tokyo, where he also did research at RIKEN. Masato uses a combination of comprehension, production, and computational modeling methods to understand human language processing and the relation between different experimental methods. His technical wizardry has dramatically improved our analysis of production data.
Eun-Kyoung Rosa Lee
PhD Student
Rosa joined us after completing a BA at Seoul National University in Korea, followed by an MA in Second Language Acquisition at UMD. Rosa studies the psycholinguistics of speaking, understanding, and prediction in native speakers and second language learners. Rosa has shown why non-native speakers sometimes outperform native speakers, and why production is sometimes more successful than comprehension.
London Dixon
PhD Student
London joined us after doing a BA in Linguistics at Rutgers University. She is working on the neuroscience of speech processing at the Maryland Neuroimaging Center with Ellen Lau. She has also worn multiple hats as part of the Language Science Station initiative at the Planet Word Museum, serving as a mentor to undergraduates, and a researcher in our Race the Robot study.
Katherine Howitt
PhD Student
Katherine covers all the bases. She did a psychology BA at Columbia and a linguistics MA at CUNY Graduate Center, mixed in with teaching computer science at Hunter College. At Maryland, she is researching language processing in children and adults, co-supervised by Jeff Lidz and Colin Phillips.
Allison Dods
PhD Student
Allison is not alone in having done a little (or a lot) of many different things before joining us. Most recently she worked for Microsoft and completed an MA in computational linguistics at the U of Washington. Prior to that she studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford, where she did research cognitive psychology and Uzbek syntax. She is co-supervised by Jeff Lidz and Colin Phillips.
Sebastián Mancha
PhD Student
Sebastián joined us from the University of Texas at Austin, where he completed a BA in Linguistics, Spanish, and Portuguese. He is interested in psycho- and neurolinguistics. He is co-supervised by Ellen Lau and Colin Phillips.
Sathvik Nair
PhD Student
Sathvik is interested in computational approaches to understanding humans. He studied computer science and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, then worked as a software engineer with Amazon Web Services in Boston before joining us at UMD Linguistics. He is co-supervised by Philip Resnik and Colin Phillips
Utku Turk
PhD Student
Utku came to UMD after completing bachelors and masters degrees at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. His main interest is in psycholinguistics, but he has little intention of limiting himself to that. He has worked on syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, and morphophonology. He is co-supervised by Ellen Lau and Colin Phillips.
Shevaun Lewis
LSC Assistant Director
Shevaun is a key figure in the Language Science Center. As a UMD grad student, she was instrumental in building the community that spawned LSC. After a few years at Johns Hopkins she returned to help lead the center. Her roles include managing graduate programs, developing interdisciplinary research initiatives, and strategic planning. She also directs the University of Maryland Autism Research Consortium.
Caitlin Eaves
LSC Assistant Director - Business
Caitlin is somebody who you want in your corner. She’s from Texas, she has lived in Yemen (and speaks good Arabic), she dives with sharks, and she tames complex budgets. Any questions? At LSC she leaps over tall- to medium-sized buildings to keep us afloat. She joined us in 2016 after a few years managing UMD’s Arabic and Persian Flagship Language Programs.