CRL Newsletter

Keith Rayner received the Humboldt Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, which includes a nice cash award and makes it possible for German students and post-docs to visit the Rayner lab (3 visitors have already been here), and for students from his lab to visit labs in Germany. Keith also received the Chancellor's Associates Research Award from UCSD this year. Congratulations, Keith!

Congratulations to former CRL-trainee & member of Vic Ferreira's lab, Bob Slevc, who has just accepted a job at the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor in Psychology, starting in January 2011!

Distinguished Professor and CRL Director Marta Kutas has received an honorary degree from Radboud University, Nijmegen (in association with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior). Congratulations, Marta!

Congratulations to Roger Levy, who received an NSF CAREER award this year, for his project entitled "Rational Language Processing with Uncertain and Noisy Input"! Roger also recently received a UCSD Hellman Award and an Academic Senate grant.

Congratulations to Gabriela Simon-Cereijido, from the Joint Doctoral Program, who recently defended her PhD dissertation, "Verb argument structure deficits in Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment who are English language learners". Gabriela is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders at California State University, Los Angeles, and a fellow in the NCRECE Research Mentoring Program for Minority Scholars.

Congratulations to Josée Poirier, from the Joint Doctoral Program, who recently defended her PhD dissertation. Her dissertation was entitled "Finding Meaning in Silence: The comprehension of ellipsis." Josée is now a Post-Doctoral Scientist with the Université de Picardie Jules-Verne, in Amiens, France, where she's examining the neural networks underlying cognitive processing in a wide range of neurological diseases.

Congratulations to Alycia Cummings, from the Joint Doctoral Program, who recently defended her PhD dissertation. Her dissertation was entitled "Brain and behavior in children with phonological disorders: Phonological, lexical, and sensory system interactions." Alycia is now an Assistant Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of North Dakota.

CRL welcomes Carolyn Quam (from the University of Pennsylvania) as a new post-doctoral researcher. Carolyn's research asks how children learn to assign clearly discriminable phonetic variation to the appropriate levels of linguistic structure -- faced with highly variable acoustic input, how do young children converge on the correct interpretations of speech? Welcome to the CRL, Carolyn!

CRL welcomes Ben Amsel (from the University of Toronto) as a new post-doctoral researcher. Ben's research interests are in human memory and knowledge representation. He is interested in how different types of knowledge are stored and commuted in the brain and what the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying semantic memory use are, as well as neural network modeling and electrophysiological recording. Welcome to the CRL, Ben!

Congratulations to the 2010-2011 recipients of the CRL Pre-doctoral training fellowship!