6 New faculty hires in language sciences!

In addition to the historic snow storms that filled our winter, we also had an unprecedented number of job talks in different areas of language sciences. The outcome of this is that the University of Maryland made at least 6 new faculty hires in language-related areas! Given that this happened in the midst of a hiring freeze, this is another mark of the university’s strong support for language science. Fuller details of these exciting new hires will follow, but here is a quick summary:

Jordan Boyd-Graber will join the iSchool. Jordan’s research focuses on applying statistical models to natural language applications, with both engineering and cognitive focus. His PhD is from Princeton, and he is currently a postdoc at Maryland with Philip Resnik.

Hal Daume will join the Dept of Computer Science. Hal is an emerging leader in the area of multilingual NLP and machine learning. He has a PhD from USC and is currently on the faculty at the U of Utah.

Naomi Feldman will join the Dept of Linguistics. Naomi is an expert in computational psycholinguistics, and is attracting much attention for her work on modeling the learning of sound systems. She is completing her PhD at Brown U, and will be at Maryland starting in Spring ’11, when she will teach an IGERT-related course on computational modeling in language.

Ellen Lau will join the Dept of Linguistics. Ellen is an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of language, combining MEG, fMRI, ERP, and behavioral measures in her work on lexical and sentence comprehension. She received her PhD from Maryland in 2009 and is currently a postdoc at Tufts U and Harvard Medical School, where she is also investigating schizophrenia and dyslexia.

Elizabeth Redcay will be joining the Dept of Psychology. Liz is an expert in social cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on non-verbal communication, early language acquisition, and autism spectrum disorder. She has a PhD from UC San Diego and is currently a postdoc at MIT.

Bob Slevcwill be joining the Dept of Psychology and CASL. Bob’s will bring much-needed expertise in language production to our community, and his interests also include memory, aphasia, second language acquisition, and language/music relations. Bob has a PhD from UC San Diego and is currently a postdoc at Rice University.