New posts for alums in 2023

Moving on to new postdocs, professorships and promotions.

Big congratulations to Annemarie van Dooren, from our PhD Class of 2020, who on September 1, 2023, became Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Groningen University in the Netherlands, after a prior postdoctoral research position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. While an active Terrapin, Annemarie worked with Valentine Hacquard and Maria Polinsky, with a dissertation on "Modal and their Complements in Dutch and Beyond."

Big congratulations also to Phoebe Gaston, from the same graduating class of 2020, who is to start as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at McMaster University. At Maryland Phoebe wrote a dissertation on "The role of syntactic prediction in auditory word recognition," supervised by Ellen Lau and Colin Phillips. Since then she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Connecticut Language and Brain Lab.

Also beginning a professorship is Rodrigo Ranero, from the SMAART class of 2021, who this year became Assistant Professor at UCLA in its Department of Spanish and Portuguese, teaching courses in linguistics. This made Rodrigo our third alum on the faculty at UCLA, where he joins Laurel Perkins *19 and Tim Hunter *10. At UMD Rodrigo had supervisors Maria Polinsky and Omer Preminger, and wrote his dissertation on "Identity Conditions on Ellipsis". After graduating, he moved to a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, before earning his new position. 

And from that same class of 2021: Anouk Dieuleveut moved to a three-year postdoc at the University of Geneva with Isabelle Charnavel on her project, "Indexicals, binding and presupposition: Towards a typology and a theory of bound indexicals." This move to Geneva comes after a couple years in Paris at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle with Ira Noveck, after graduating from Maryland with a dissertation on "Finding Modal Force", chaired by Valentine Hacquard and Alexander Williams.

Our most recent graduates, Masato Nakamura *23 and Craig Thorburn *23, have each accepted postdoctoral research positions.

Masato is now at Saarland University for a postdoctoral research position with Matthew Crocker in the Department of Language Science and Technology, following completion of his dissertation here at Maryland, "Generating and measuring predictions in language processing," under the supervision of Colin Phillips.

Craig is at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology for a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Lori Holt, after recently defending his dissertation, "Second Language Speech Sound Learning: A Computational and Neural Approach," under the supervision of Naomi Feldman.

Going back a couple years:

Congratulations to Alayo Tripp, from the Class of 2019, who this Fall began as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida. While at Maryland, Alayo wrote a dissertation that developed "An Affliative Model of Lexical Learning", supervised by Naomi Feldman and Bill Idsardi, before doing postdoctoral work in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, with faculty mentors Ben Munson and Peggy Nelson.

And from the Class of 2018, Anton Malko recently started a position as a postdoc at Australian National University in Canberra, helping to build experimental infrastructure at the university, after a few years working doing data science research at an Australian government institute in Sydney. While a student at Maryland, Anton wrote a dissertation with Colin Phillips on "The role of structural information in the processing of long-distance dependencies."

This past year has also been a big one for Aaron Steven White *15: he was promoted to Associate Professor of Linguistics with tenure at Rochester, and also won support from the NSF's Faculty Early Career Development Program - also known as CAREER - for his project on "Logical Form Induction" (BCS #22371375). In 2024, Aaron will also be helping Rochester host the 34th SALT conference. At Maryland, Aaron wrote his dissertation on "Information and Incrementality in Syntactic Bootstrapping," aiming "to construct a computational model of syntactic bootstrapping[, and to] use this model to investigate the limits on the amount of information about propositional attitude verb meanings that can be gleaned from syntactic distributions." His supervisors were Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz, who chaired a dissertation committee that also included Philip Resnik and Naomi Feldman.

Finally, Nina Kazanina, from the Class of 2005, is beginning a major position as Professor of Basic Neurosciences at the University of Geneva, where she will be lead a research group within Evolving Language, Switzerland's "first National Centre of Competence in Research dedicated to language," whose directorate includes Paola Merlo from the very early PhD Class of 1992. Nina wrote her UMD dissertation with Colin on "The acquisition and processing of backwards anaphora," and since 2007 she has been on the faculty at the University of Bristol.

Congratulations to all our fantastic alums!