Program & Traineeships

The goal of the LCS-IGERT training program is to create a community of scholar-scientists with the conceptual reach and technical expertise to integrate the computational, cognitive and neuroscientific study of communication, be it characterized as human-linguistic, animal or machine. Training is tied to two broad themes that crosscut the various approaches to studying communication. The first emphasizes communication as a dynamical process that unfolds along multiple time scales, ranging from milliseconds (as in planning a message) to centuries (as in evolving dialects, languages, and systems of animal communication). The second emphasizes communication as a process in context, where contexts range from the physical setting and communicative history of a specific conversation, to the linguistic, social and technological assumptions of social groups. The communicating entities of study may also be of many types, from groups of baboons to expert medical teams, to networked computers. Much of the research and educational opportunities here at Penn emphasize these themes, and are brought together in this interdisciplinary training program.

Please click on the links below to page down to descriptions of our:

Graduate Program and Certificate in Language and Communication Sciences

Any existing Penn graduate student who is currently a member of an IGERT-affiliated department is welcome to participate in this program and its activities. Students who complete the program requirements, described below, will obtain a Certificate in Language and Communication Sciences upon completing his/her Ph.D.

The LCS-IGERT training program is designed to work with Penn’s existing graduate education infrastructure, especially with regard to how our training will interact with ongoing interdisciplinary training in the cognitive sciences more generally. Fortunately, the administrative structure of graduate studies at Penn is designed to facilitate programs that span departments and schools. There is no centralized formal organization unit; instead the University supports 62 Ph.D.-granting Graduate Groups spread over its 12 Schools. The Graduate Groups are organized principally along intellectual lines and consist of standing faculty in one or more departments, as well as distinguished Adjunct faculty from outside the University. This organization makes for agile, changeable, cross-disciplinary links, and bridges the more static departmental and administrative structures of the University. Because the binding between individuals in a Graduate Group is intellectual rather than artificial, joint advising and course offerings are simple collaborative enterprises. The LCS-IGERT program is greatly facilitated by this administrative structure. For instance, even though IGERT graduate students must be admitted into a specific Graduate Group, coursework may readily be taken across any reasonable spectrum of offerings. This lack of administrative and departmental barriers means that the cross-disciplinary education that is the hallmark of IGERT programs is both historically straightforward and academically legitimatised at Penn. The lack of barriers will give IGERT students the flexibility to study and learn the diverse topics needed for interdisciplinary research in the dynamics of communication.

Graduate training in the communication sciences is also helped by the University’s long-standing tradition to support interdisciplinary research within Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience. Two relevant research centers exist: The Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) and The Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN). At a very practical level, these centers offer physical space for IGERT activities in centralized locations, including IGERT seminars and research labs. Both centers are also committed to offering office space for IGERT short-term visitors, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. The lack of physical barriers therefore will give IGERT students unusual flexibility in their interactions with faculty and students, facilitating spontaneous collaboration.

Several course and research requirements are expected of LCS-IGERT graduate students over the course of the 5-year graduate program. These requirements, outlined below, have been carefully designed to:

  • enhance interdisciplinary training, establish a common intellectual community across students diverse backgrounds and core training
  • preserve training in each student’s core discipline
  • offer secondary discipline training without financial hardship to each student
  • develop a shared mathematical and computational foundation for all students

These training requirements, listed in the table below, are ordered chronologically, reflecting the order in which student participants will most likely encounter them over their graduate career. (Exact ordering will be flexible, based on individual student needs.)

Training Mechanism Purposes Timing
Training in Core Discipline Provide in-depth expertise in student's core discipline 1st and 2nd years of graduate career
Common-Ground and Common-Thread Seminar Provide weekly intellectual gathering of LCS students; present/discuss research Every year of graduate career
Mathematical Foundations I and II Provide two semesters of training in communication theory and its mathematical basis Completed by the end of 3rd year of graduate career
Graduate Training in Secondary Discipline Provide training in secondary area 3rd year of graduate career
Ph.D. Dissertation Research Encourage cross-disciplinary theses 4th and/or 5th year of graduate career

Training in Core Discipline

LCS-IGERT graduate trainees will typically come from the participating core graduate programs: Anthropology, Biology, Computer and Information Sciences, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Psychology. LCS-IGERT trainees will be expected to satisfy all the requirements of their home department. We recognize that in-depth expertise is needed within any science, and we do not want to water-down training for the sake of interdisciplinary breadth. Most participating departments have PhD course requirements that are typically completed after the first two years.

Common-Ground and Common-Thread Graduate Research Seminar

All LCS-IGERT trainees, regardless of their year, are expected to participate in this weekly research seminar designed to provide an intellectual gathering for those students interested in language and communication. Sessions will alternate biweekly between what we call From-Within and From-Without meetings. During a From-Within meeting, one student will be expected to present his/her research to the group. This has two benefits: (1) Student presenters, working with their advisors, will have the opportunity to explain the broader significance of their research to non-experts in related disciplines; (2) All students will be exposed to developing research projects from related disciplines, potentially shaping these projects as they develop. During From-Without weeks, students will present and discuss selected readings by experts from outside Penn, in particular, that week's colloquium speaker at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, or the Brain and Language series. This "journal club" will expose students to outside opinions, and prepare them for the colloquium in a way that is not normally possible. This seminar establishes communication across different areas of expertise (establishing common-ground) and does so throughout all stages of educational development (establishing the common thread).

Mathematical Foundations I and II

The backgrounds and mathematical sophistication of the students entering the LCS-IGERT graduate program will vary widely. A two-semester Mathematical Foundations sequence will provide all students with basic mathematical modeling and algorithmic tools, while still providing sufficient challenges for the most advanced. These two courses (course numbers to be announced soon), will be taught in a computer/media lab setting and will cover relevant aspects of a wide range of mathematical topics that are directly relevant to animal, human or machine communication, or that provide prerequisites for these topics. Examples of topics directly relevant to communication include information theory, game theory, and formal language theory. Examples of important topics include signal processing, machine learning, and probabilistic models. These two semesters obviously cannot substitute entirely for the dozen or more semesters that normally would be required to cover a similar range of topics. However, they can give students the ability to understand and implement algorithms from published descriptions, especially given appropriate libraries of basic functions, and to discuss alternative approaches with experts in a well-informed manner. It is clearly not the case that every LCS-IGERT students will use every mathematical or algorithmic topic from this course in his or her research. However, applications are often unexpected, and fortune favors the prepared. In addition, this background will enable students to make sense of a wide range of courses and readings that might otherwise be inaccessible. Finally, the shared experience of this course will help IGERT students to establish a personal as well as conceptual basis for future collaborations. Each semester of this two-semester sequence will be co-taught by two faculty members (Liberman and Kahana will teach the first semester, in Spring of 2006). Because of the diversity of topics and of the students' backgrounds, the two-semester course sequence will be organized into a series of "modules", each designed to explicate a core mathematical and algorithmic topic. Each module will deal with specific problems of the type that IGERT students need to solve and will be as self-contained as possible, although of course one module will often require understanding of concepts and techniques taught in another.

Graduate Training in Secondary Discipline

During their third year of graduate school, LCS-IGERT students are expected to take focused coursework in their secondary discipline, designed to support plans for their Ph.D. research. For instance, a student studying machine learning in Computer Science would be able to take a series of human and animal learning courses offered through Psychology. A psychologist planning to do her Ph.D. research on the experimental study of language learning would take linguistics courses in Syntax, Semantics and Discourse Reference. A computer scientist might become trained in cognitive neuroscientific techniques. Each student will be advised in making course selections for secondary training through discussions with his/her interdisciplinary advisors.

Ph.D. Dissertation Research

Students will be well equipped to conduct interdisciplinary research on language and communication. LCS-IGERT students will be funded through their fifth year because of the interim support in their 3rd and 4th years. Small research funds will also be made available to students on a case-by-case basis when other funds are not available to a student.

Applying to Graduate School
LCS-IGERT Pre-Doctoral Traineeships

Participation in the Language and Communication Sciences Program at Penn requires admission to one of Penn's Ph.D. programs. IGERT participating graduate programs include: Anthropology, Biology, Computer and Information Sciences, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Psychology. Please click on these links to learn more about graduate school in each department. To apply to one of these Ph.D. programs, please contact the department directly and/or apply online.

A limited number of IGERT pre-doctoral traineeships, with $30,000 stipends, are available to students involved in the LCS certificate program. It is important to note that being an IGERT trainee is not a requirement for obtaining an LCS certificate: students who have other funding (either from their department or from outside sources) are welcome to participate and obtain a certificate.

IGERT graduate trainees must already be admitted to a participating Penn graduate program and be a U.S. citizen. Each year, five additional graduate students will be offered IGERT traineeships. These trainees will be guaranteed 5 years of graduate funding (instead of the usual 4 years), achieved by using IGERT funds to pay for stipends in 2 of their 5 years. This would supplement departmental support for the other years and, crucially, allow each student five years to fulfill the additional IGERT training requirements (detailed above) without financial hardship.

If you are applying to a Penn Ph.D. program and wish to be considered for an IGERT Graduate Traineeship, please contact the LCS Program Coordinator Laurel Sweeney, laurels(at)ircs.upenn.edu. In addition, please include the following sentence at the end of your Personal Statement in your graduate application:
"I wish to be considered for an IGERT Graduate Traineeship in Language and Communication Sciences."

Existing Penn graduate students who wish to be considered for an IGERT Traineeship should simply contact the LCS Program Coordinator Laurel Sweeney, laurels(at)ircs.upenn.edu, for further information.

LCS-IGERT Post-Doctoral Opportunities: Application Deadline February 8th

Post-doctoral opportunities are available to individuals who seek cross-disciplinary expertise in language and communication. Preference for LCS-IGERT postdocs will be given to applicants who show exceptional promise for interdisciplinary research and whose presence would enrich the intellectual life of our IGERT community. Because of the special nature of this graduate training program, IGERT postdocs will have additional responsibilities specifically designed to enhance the training of LCS-IGERT graduate students. In particular, postdocs will be expected to co-run the weekly Common-Ground Graduate Research Seminar. Their duties in this course will be to advise and guide students on a continuing basis, on their research presentations and their research plans. If a particular IGERT postdoc comes to the program with considerable quantitative skills, he/she may instead be asked to assist in the teaching of the Mathematical Foundations course (i.e., co-teach with a faculty member).

Post-Doctoral IGERT applicants will be expected to submit a three-page research proposal reflecting a collaboration between at least two IGERT-participating faculty. It is recommended that prior to submitting a proposal, the applicant contact directly Penn IGERT faculty who may be potential collaborators/mentors. Preference will be given to applicants who show exceptional promise for interdisciplinary research and whose presence would enrich the intellectual life of our IGERT community. In addition to receiving mentorship from the IGERT faculty, fellows will mentor IGERT graduate students, via the co-running of a weekly research seminar with students as well as formal research collaboration.

All LCS postdocs receive competitive stipends in accordance with NSF and University of Pennsylvania guidelines. Applicants must submit:

  • A short research proposal of no more 3 single-spaced pages;
  • A curriculum vitae;
  • A brief statement of current research activities;
  • A one-page description of teaching and mentoring experience and philosophy;
  • and three letters of recommendation.

Review of applications will begin immediately and remain open until filled.

Please send application materials to:
LCS Postdoctoral Selection Committee
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
University of Pennsylvania
3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228

Minority and female applicants are encouraged to apply.
Applicants must be U.S. Citizens.
The University of Pennsylvania is an Affirmative Actions/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Institute for Research in Cognitive Science • 3401 Walnut Street • Suite 400A
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 • Tel (215) 898-0357 • Fax (215) 573-9247
Questions? Comments? Please e-mail igertinfo@ircs.upenn.edu