I am an Associate Professor with tenure in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Linguistics, and a formal affiliation with the Cognitive Science Program. I created and direct the Meaning Lab, which conducts NSF-funded research into what adults and children know about word and sentence meaning. In 2019, I was one of three recipients of the Albert S. Raubenheimer award for Outstanding Junior Faculty in the USC Dornsife College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences. Prior to my arrival at USC in 2017, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Northwest…
I am an Associate Professor with tenure in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Linguistics, and a formal affiliation with the Cognitive Science Program. I created and direct the Meaning Lab, which conducts NSF-funded research into what adults and children know about word and sentence meaning. In 2019, I was one of three recipients of the Albert S. Raubenheimer award for Outstanding Junior Faculty in the USC Dornsife College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences. Prior to my arrival at USC in 2017, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and the Cognitive Science Program. In Evanston, I created and directed the Child Language Development Laboratory.
I earned my PhD in 2014 from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, advised by Valentine Hacquard. Paul Pietroski, Alexander Williams, Jeffrey Lidz, and Colin Phillips were unofficial mentors. At UMD, my research in semantics, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, as well as the (then nascent) Maryland Language Science Center.
I have led or been involved in collaborative research projects with linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists. Some of these researchers were undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars, usually under my direction. I have helped build research infrastructure and public outreach projects with researchers across the communication sciences. Much of the research currently being carried out in USC’s Meaning Lab is funded by a National Science Foundation Brain and Cognitive Sciences grant that I was awarded in 2017.
