Current Team
Graduate Students, Research Staff, Research Assistants
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Allison Macdonald
Post-bac Fellow
Allison joins us as a post-bac research fellow after completing a BA in Linguistics and English at Northwestern University, where she participated in a wide variety of research, ranging from psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to analyses of court transcripts and diets of hundreds of animal species, and where she also worked as an editor for literary publications. In other words, Allison has the kind of wide-ranging curiosity and tastes that we love!