Current Team
Graduate Students, Research Staff, Research Assistants
Allyson Ettinger
PhD Student
Allyson works on meaning, with any tool she can get her hands on. She is currently investigating the interpretive mechanisms behind the famous Moses Illusion, and is exploring language processing in Chinese. She studied Linguistics and Psychology at Brandeis University, then studied in Nanjing, China, before spending 2 years managing NYU’s MEG lab. She holds an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Co-advisor: Alexander Williams and Philip Resnik.
Lara Ehrenhofer
PhD Student
Lara is British, Swiss, or German, take your pick. She is interested in phonological processing and cognitive neuroscience, and much else besides. She’s currently working on maturational effects on learning and on the generation of lexical predictions. She did a BA in English and MPhil in Linguistics in Oxford, and she is a Fulbright Fellow and a UMD Flagship Fellow. In 2014-2015 she coordinated the PULSAR seminar for undergraduates. Co-advisor: Bill Idsardi.
Anton Malko
PhD Student
Anton is our minstrel. His guitar is never far from his side at parties. He is from Chelyabinsk, Russia, noted for its recent meteor visit, and trained in St Petersburg as a French-Russian interpreter, before getting hooked on cognitive science. He enjoys syntax and language processing, and has done experiments on agreement attraction in Russian. He’s currently working on apparent illusion-resistant phenomena, looking to see if they are not. home
Nick Huang
PhD Student
After completing his BA at Yale in Linguistics and Economics, Nick followed the economics path for a while, working in management consulting in the US and in his native Singapore. Realizing that the true path to wealth and glory lies in linguistics, he joined our research team in 2014. Nick is interested in syntax and language processing in native and non-native speakers. He has been working on tense in Mandarin (he found some!), and so-called ‘escapable islands’ in syntax.
Phoebe Gaston
PhD Student
Phoebe likes syntax, psycho/neurolinguistics, and running. What’s not to like! She did a BA in Linguistics at Yale, where she investigated Appalachian English as part of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project; after a brief stint at the MPI for Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, she spent a couple of years as a researcher at NYU, where she worked on the neuroscience of lexical processing using MEG. She joined our team in 2015 and is our 5th UMD Flagship Fellow.
Hanna Muller
Lab manager
Hanna keeps our research on the straight and narrow. She joined us in 2016 after completing a BA in linguistics at NYU, with minors in computer science, mathematics, and Spanish, and her German is pretty useful, too. At UMD she is working on projects involving eye-tracking, electrophysiology, and speech production.
Tess Wood
LSC Assistant Director
Tess is the person who holds the Language Science Center together. Tess coordinates the Langscape project, co-directs the PULSAR program, works on grants, communications, and much more. She hails from Yorkshire in northern England, has a PhD in linguistics from UC Berkeley, where she did fieldwork on native American languages, and more recently has managed research projects on infant cognition and autism.
Shevaun Lewis
LSC Assistant Director
Shevaun is a key figure in the Language Science Center. During her PhD at UMD she was instrumental in building the community that spawned LSC. After 3 years at Johns Hopkins University she has returned to UMD to help lead the center. Her LSC roles include managing our graduate programs, developing cross-cutting research, and building partnerships. Her research expertise is in psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and experimental pragmatics.
Caitlin Eaves
LSC Business Manager
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. Any questions? At LSC she leaps over tall- to medium-sized buildings to keep us afloat. She joined us in early 2016 after a number of years with UMD’s Arabic and Persian Flagship Language Programs.