Current Team

Graduate Students, Research Staff, Research Assistants

Phoebe Gaston

PhD Student

Phoebe followed a BA in Linguistics at Yale with a couple of years managing a neurolinguistics lab at NYU. She joined our team in 2015 and is our 5th UMD Flagship Fellow. Phoebe’s deep dive into how context affects word recognition has re-shaped our understanding of how we relate neurocognitive processes to diverse psycho- and neurolinguistic methods. Together with Hanna Muller she has also led important research into gender representation in linguistics publishing, and she spent a year as a student leader of the PULSAR program for undergraduate language scientists.

Hanna Muller

PhD Student

Hanna joined us in 2016 as a lab manager, following a BA in linguistics at NYU, with minors in computer science, mathematics, and Spanish. She had such a good time that she’s still with us for her PhD, where she is our 6th UMD Flagship Fellow. Her work on negative polarity item illusions has changed how we understand this phenomenon, and now she is broadening her reach to notorious cases of Moses Illusions, where she is combining skills from psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. Together with Phoebe Gaston, Hanna has led an important research project on gender representation in linguistics publishing.

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’s past research used psycho- and neurolinguistic methods to understand prediction in language, and currently he is using computational modeling to understand how contexts are used to generate expectations about upcoming words.

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.