Website: https://bilingualismmindbrain.com
Department: Education
Research interests: Bilingualism, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Neuroscience
What do you enjoy most about mentoring and working with undergraduate students?
My research uses the tools of cognitive neuroscience to examine second language learning and bilingualism. This is a topic that has come into its own in the last two decades, in part because it provides a lens to examine issues of language, cognition and development, but also because it attracts an extraordinarily diverse group of students, most of whom are bilingual themselves. For a set of these students, research becomes a path by which they can bring their life experience into the lab and use that experience to inform and shape the research itself. Over the course of my career, I have had many opportunities to bring undergraduates into research in ways that enrich my research and perspective and, at the same time, enable them to pursue directions that might not have been obvious at the start of their studies. Classroom teaching is the bread and butter of being a university professor. But I view research training with undergraduates as the most important teaching we do. The model that we follow in the BMB lab is to create teams of undergraduate research students who work together with me, the graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scholars as team leaders. We meet together in a weekly lab meeting and each team meets frequently over the course of the week. The size of the lab varies from quarter to quarter, with 35-60 undergraduate research students at any one time. Our lab also hosts a biweekly talk series that has been a silver lining from the pandemic, where research colleagues across the country and the world come together to share research on language learning and bilingualism. Undergraduate research students are encouraged to participate in those meetings. This is not informal teaching. It is the most important teaching we do as faculty and the teaching that has the most profound consequences. We share research, we work through the thorny problems that we confront in conducting and communicating our research, and we discuss issues of professional development. We learn from each other and from the diverse experiences that each person brings to the lab. Most critically, the goal is to have each research student come to see themselves as part of a larger community of scientists who make a difference in the world.
