CRL Newsletter

CRL newsletter welcomes a new editor, Jenny Staab! Jenny is currently a third year JDP graduate student working in CRL. She came to San Diego after her undergraduate studies in psychology and cognitive science at the University of Technology, Dresden (Germany) and the Universities Lumiere and Claude Bernard, Lyon (France) and having obtained a Master's degree in neuropsychology from the University of Quebec, Montreal (Canada). Jenny is interested in applying electrophysiological measures to language processing and is currently working in the laboratory of Dr. Marta Kutas. Jenny and Ayse Pinar Saygin will work together to bring you new issues of the newsletter.

Congratulations to Dr. Barbara Conboy and Dr. Janet Calderon on completing their graduate studies in the Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. Both recent grads are already working as postdoctoral researchers. Barbara is at the University of Washington in Seattle working in the laboratory of Dr. Patricia Kuhl. Janet is at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, working with Dr. Kathryn Kohnert, who is herself a graduate of the JDP.

Congratulations also to Dr. Mieko Ueno who defended her PhD in linguistics and cognitive science in December. In January 2004, Mieko is starting an NIH postdoctoral position at the Psychology department of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she will work with Susan Garnsey and continuing on her sentence processing experimental work, using both ERP and behavioral methodologies. We wish Mieko good luck in Illinois and will miss her in San Diego.

Society for Neuroscience - The 2003 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN) was held in New Orleans in November. Cognitive science graduate student Ayse Pinar Saygin gave a talk presenting work done jointly with Stephen Wilson, Donald Hagler, Elizabeth Bates and Marty Sereno. JDP graduate student Cristina Saccuman also was first author on a talk presenting joint work with Daniela Perani, Stefano Cappa, Elizabeth Bates and others. CRL affiliated UCLA Neurosciences graduate student Stephen Wilson gave a talk on work done jointly with Ayse Pinar Saygin, Marty Sereno and Marco Iacoboni.

Cognitive Neuroscience Society - The 2004 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) will be held in San Francisco in April. Computer science graduate student Karen Anderson's abstract submission on age of acquisition in quasi-regular domains was one of nine selected for the Graduate Students Present Forum. Congratulations Karen! We will keep you updated on other CRL presenters.

Human Brain Mapping - The Ninth Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) was held in New York City in June. CRL affiliated graduate students Ayse Pinar Saygin and Stephen Wilson and faculty Marty Sereno presented their work.

Cognitive Science graduate student Robert F. Williams received a Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education for his doctoral research on material structure and conceptual integration in time-telling instruction.

CRL welcomed three new postdocs in the Kutas lab recently. Lea Hald, Francesca Pesciarelli, and Horacio Barber. Lea got her PhD from the University of Arizona, Tuscon and carried out her research at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. Her current research is on the electrophysiology of semantics and world knowledge in sentence processing. Francesca came from the University of Padua in Italy. She is currently working on ERP studies of word recognition during the attentional blink effect. Horacio received his PhD from University La Laguna Teneriffa in Spain. He works on gender agreement using ERPs.

Fabrizio Piras visited CRL in November from Rome to work on the International Aphasia Project. He then visited our sister aphasia site in Martinez in Northern California, to work further with Dr. Nina Dronkers.

Holger Keibel from the University of Freiburg in Germany is also back at CRL! He has been awarded a DAAD fellowship from the German government to return to UCSD in May and stay for a year. Holger will be working with Jeff Elman on a joint child language acquisition project involving CRL and the Max Planck Institute for Evoluationary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.