LCS Director
John Trueswell
(215) 898-0911
trueswel(at)psych.upenn.edu
IGERT Graduate Trainees
(in alphabetical order by last name)
Shermin de Silva has been a graduate student in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania since 2004.
She attended University of California, Berkeley, from 1998 to 2002 and received a Bachelor of Arts Degree
in Integrative Biology and Philosophy. She conducts comparative theoretical and field research and her experience
includes studying vocalizations of spotted hyenas, and caching behavior in fox squirrels. She is currently studying
social organization and acoustic communication of free-ranging Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. Her interests include animal behavior,
communication and cognition.
Sarah Drucker has been a graduate student in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
since 2007. She completed her undergraduate studies in Linguistics and Cognitive Science,
also at Penn. For two years prior to joining the graduate program, she served as the research
assistant for Delphine Dahan. Sarah's current research interests are in lexical representation
and lexical semantics, sentence comprehension, and the relationship between static lexical
representations and real-time, incremental language interpretation.
Melanie Goetz is a 3nd year PhD student in Computer and Information Science at the University
of Pennsylvania. She graduated from MIT in 2004 with bachelor's degrees in Linguistics and Mathematics
with Computer Science, having done undergraduate research in psycholinguistics, computational linguistics,
and syntax. After graduating, she spent a year at ATR in Kyoto, Japan working on Japanese-English machine
translation. She has been at Penn since 2005 working in computational linguistics. Her specific research interests
include deterministic parsing, TAG parsing, and syntax-based machine translation.
Kyle Gorman is a second-year
graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a B.A. in Linguistics with highest distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign in 2006. His research interests are phonetics, decipherment of writing systems, and acquisition and change.
Josh Jacobs is a
graduate student in Neuroscience working with Mike Kahana. His current research involves using computational and statistical techniques to study neural correlates of human behavior.
To accomplish this, he studies intracranial brain recordings from epilepsy patients.
Josh attended MIT from 1997-2002 and received MEng and SB degrees in Computer Science.
David January
is a graduate student in Psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania. He attended Swarthmore College from 1999 to 2003,
graduating with High Honors with a major in Linguistics and a
concentration in Cognitive Science. In the year between his
undergraduate and graduate educations, David served as the research
assistant for John Trueswell at Penn. In 2004, he moved into a new
office across the hall as a graduate student. His research interests
include sentence processing, including computational and
neuropsychological models thereof, psychological implications of
various forms of grammars (e.g., transformational vs.
unification-based), and issues in language and cognition.
Emily Pitler is a first-year graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
She graduated from Yale University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.
Her research interests include computational linguistics and machine learning.
She did undergraduate research in morpheme segementation and intends to begin work in parsing at Penn.
Carolyn Quam is a fourth-year
Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology
at the University of Pennsylvania.
She received her BA from Stanford University in 2004 with departmental honors in Psychology and a minor in Music.
Her research addresses language-acquisition issues including acquisition of phonology,
the application of phonological knowledge to word learning, and how regularities in the input constrain
children’s word-learning hypotheses. Through experimental investigation and corpus phonetics,
she has been considering the acquisition of pitch categories, investigating how children discover
the relevant levels of pitch structure in their language (e.g., intonation and lexical tone),
cope with interactions between levels of structure, and use their knowledge of native-language
pitch structure in the interpretation of novel words.
Maria Rakhovskaya is a graduate student in Biology (Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity track)
at the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1999 and 2003, she was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland,
which she completed with a B.S. with Honors in zoology, B.A. in history and B.A. in Spanish literature.
Prior to beginning her graduate studies, Maria was a post-bacc fellow at the National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development (at NIH), where she studied primate vocal development. She also worked in the
field studying Alaskan sockeye salmon migration and social interactions of howler monkeys in Nicaragua.
Her research interests include animal cognition, animal communication, and behavioral and social consequences
of a stress response provoked by ecological factors.
Neville Ryant is a second-year PhD student
in the Department of Linguistics.
He also graduated from Penn with a BA in Linguistics in 2005. Currently,
he is exploring the areas of mathematical linguistics and neurolinguistics and how they intersect
with basic questions in theoretical syntax/semantics. He also has secondary interests in linguistic metatheory
and gramamar construction.
LCS Administrative Staff
- Christine Massey (IRCS), massey(at)seas.upenn.edu
- Laurel Sweeney, Administrative Coordinator, laurels(at)seas.upenn.edu
IGERT-Affiliated Departments
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science • 3401 Walnut Street • Suite 400A