Amy Weinberg takes position as deputy executive director at CASL

Amy Weinberg, Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), and the Department of Computer Science, was named as the new deputy executive director of the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). Dr. Weinberg played a key role in the founding of CASL in 2003 where she served as Area Director for Technical Use from 2004-2007. She returns to CASL with an even greater wealth of experience in Language Science research, including directing efforts for the Language Cognition and Culture Center as part of her appointment in the UMD Vice President for Research's office since 2007, working as PI on the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins from 2007-2010, and serving as co-PI for our own IGERT program on the Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity since 2008. See also: http://www.casl.umd.edu/node/1360.

Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) awarded $3000 for IGERT poster presentation

At this year’s NSF-IGERT annual meeting (May 24-25, Washington DC) Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) was awarded $3000 for her poster presentation on "Why bilinguals forget or not forget what their parents told them." The poster was based on joint research studies with Shannon Hoerner (LING) and several language science faculty. The award is meant to support Sunyoung's ongoing research in the US and Korea on the linguistic and perceptual abilities of heritage language speakers.

This year’s IGERT poster competition featured one student representative from each of the roughly 130 currently active IGERT programs, spanning across areas such as ecology, nanoscience, robotics, fuel cell technology, and applied mathematics. In her presentation, Sunyoung highlighted the parts of her research that the general public could relate to and conveyed why her research should be of interest to them.

The IGERT meeting also offered Sunyoung the opportunity present to engineering students the wikis that the UMD-IGERT language science students created to enhance interdisciplinary communication. She also took part in a session on how to present your work in a 60-second 'elevator speech', and learned about emerging opportunities for digital science and science journalism. The exercise was meant to encourage students to engage in sharing research and ideas with scholars of other disciplines.