New positions for alums

A budding grove of young Terrapins.

Congratulations to the Class of 2025, one of the largest in our department's history, who brought us much good news to be celebrated, as did many other Terps perdu who they now join. 

Imane Bou-Saboun *25 became a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Linguistics Department, working with Athulya Aravind in the brand-new Child Language Development Lab. She is continuing her work on child Tashlhiyt syntax developed in her dissertation, "The acquisition of wh-questions and related phenomena in Tashlhiyt Berber," which she wrote under the supervision of advisors Jeff Lidz and Masha Polinsky and defended last summer to a committe with Aron and Alexander as regular members, plus Yi Ting Huang representing the Dean of the Graduate School. 

Maša Bešlin *25 traveled just down the road ad Ripas Potomaci in Marylandia, to a postdoctoral position in syntax at the Georgetown Department of Linguistics. Before that she defened her dissertation, "Lexical category, (re)categorization, and locality in morphosyntax," to a committee, chaired by Maria Polinsky, including Norbert and Alexander, plus Dave Embick from the University of Pennsylvania, and, representing the Dean, Michael Israel.

In June 2025 Clara Cuonzo *25 defended her dissertation, "Disentangling morphosyntax from morphonology: A re-evaluation of morphological priming" to a committee chaired by Ellen and filled out with Bill, Alexander and Dave Embick, as well as Bob Slevc representing the Dean. Clara then returned to the Apennine Peninsula to work with the National Forest Service of Italy in building a healthier natural environment.

Leslie (Ruolan Li) Famularo *25 is now a research scientist at Dolby, working on audio technologies. She graduated in 2025 after defending her dissertation on "Grounding speech perception modeling in auditory neuroscience through differentiability," chaired by Naomi, together with Ramani Duraiswami from Computer Science.

Now at Amazon is Eun-Kyoung Rosa Lee *25, who took a position as a research scientist after completing a dissertation supervised by Colin Phillips on "Context-driven expectations in real-time language processing." Rosa's committee included Naomi, Ellen, Philip and, Bob Slevc.

Among several 2025'ers heading across eastward is Polina Pleshak *25, who is now in Budapest at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics working as a postdoctoral researcher with Tamás Halm on his project concerning "Radically Truncated Clauses". Polina defended her PhD Thesis, "Diagnosing small nominals: Theoretical implications from Moksha and Hill Mari", to a committee of Howard Lasnik, Jeff Lidz, Eric Potsdam, Paolo Santorio and, as Chair, Maria Polinsky.

Meanwhile Luisa Seguin *25 headed to the French Riviera for a two-year research postdoc in Nice at the Université de Côte d'Azur within its "Bases, Corpus, Languages" group under the supervision of Lena Baunaz, and funded by the IdEx program. Her plan is to work on intervention effects among Franco-Provençal languages in the dialect continuum from Catalonia to the southwestern Alps. This came after Luisa spent the autumn of 2025 near home in the Aosta Valley, at the Centre d'Études Francoprovençales in Saint-Nicolas, working with its director, Christiane Dunoyer. Luisa's dissertation, "Overt-Covert movement, copy deletion, and chain realization in Valdôtain Patois," was supervised by Masha and Aron,  and defended to a committee that also included Howard Lasnik and NYU's Gary Thoms, as well as Paolo Santorio from Philosophy representing the Dean.

Yuanfan (Jack) Ying *25 went a little further, beginning a two-year postdoc with Patrick Wong in his Laboratory for Language, Learning, and the Brain at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They areworking on a longitudinal project on how caregiver interventions affect the linguistic development of autistic children in rural areas of Sichuan. Jack wrote his dissertation, "Navigating linguistic complexity in acquisition," on the acquisition of definite reference and wh-interrogative syntax, working mainly with Jeff, Alexander and Valentine. Ellen and Yi Ting completed the committee.

And finally at the alphabetic end of the class is Xinchi Yu *25, who flew east to Lyon, capital of French gastronomy, to work at the CNRS Institute of Cognitive Sciences Marc Jeannerod with Director of Research Liuba Papeo, on two years of funding from the Fyssen Foundation. Xinchi's thesis in the NACS program, "Mapping the neural taxonomy of mental objects in moment-to-moment cognition," was supervised by Ellen Lau and defended to a committee of Jeff, Alexander, Zane Xie from NACS, and Yi Ting Huang representing the Dean. He now joins Professor Papeo on a project on the neural basis for long-term memory of social events.

The Fall of 2025 brought a new beginning for Nika Jurov from the Class of 2024, as she began a position Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon in the city of Eugene. The professorship began after a one year postdoctoral position with Jochen Triesch at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, extending her own dissertation research and also studying mechanisms of attention in bat audition. In 2024 Nika defended her dissertation on "Modeling adaptability mechanisms of speech perception," co-chaired by co-advisors Naomi Feldman and Bill Idsardi, together with Ellen Lau, former postdoc Thomas Schatz, and Jonathan Simon from Electrical Engineering.

Fall of 2025 brought 2023 graduate Craig Thorburn to Linguistics at the University Chicago, where he is now Assistant Instructional Professor focusing on computational linguistics and hoping to launch a new minor in the area.  In 2023 Craig completed his dissertation,  "Second Language Speech Sound Learning: A Computational and Neural Approach," under the supervision of Naomi Feldman.  Since then he has been at University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology on a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Lori Holt. Now Craig, full coverage parser of our country, heads to the capital of the Upper Mid-West, after a postdoc in Texas, graduate school in the Mid-Atlantic, and college in New England. 

Kasia Hitczenko *19 took a big step with her appointment as Assistant Professor in the faculty of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. At Maryland Kasia wrote a dissertation on "How to use context for phonetic learning and perception from naturalistic speech," supervised by Naomi, and defended to a committe of Bill, Jeff and OSU's Micha Elsner with HESP's Rochelle Newman representing the Dean. Her first position after graduation was a postdoc Northwestern University, where she studied speech and language in individuals at high-risk for developing a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. She then moved had a second postdoc in Paris at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in the Language Acquisition Across Cultures team with Alex Cristia, before becoming an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Computer Science at George Washington University in 2023. Now Kasia starts her life on the tenure track as a Blue Hen!

Lastly there is a big change coming for Shota Momma *16, who in Fall 2026 begins as Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT. Shota will be leaving the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has been Assistant Professor since 2019, following a three-year postdoc at UC San Diego with Vic Ferreira. Shota's  dissertation, Parsing, Generation, and Grammar, was supported an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant (BCS 1530332), under the mentorship of Co-PI's Colin Phillips and Ellen Lau, and defended to a committee that also included Bill Idsardi and Bob Slevc, plus Rochelle Newman representing the Dean. Since Fall 2024 Shota has himself been a mentor to a Terp of more recent vintage, Alex Krauska *24, who is presently with Shota on a two-year postdoctoral research position, following her dissertation, A World without Words, supervised by Ellen Lau.

Congratulations to all of our wonderful alumni!