Calen MacDonald
Calen graduated from Emory University in 2022 with a B.S. in neuroscience and behavioral biology and a B.A. in English and creative writing. Calen first became interested in language and cultural evolution as an undergrad while doing comparative cognition research. As a graduate student, Calen continues to study language change and the mechanisms of language transmission. He is particularly interested in the evolution of language in online communities. At 6’7, Calen is the tallest cognitive psychologist he knows.
Felicity Frinsel
Felicity graduated cum laude from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, in 2015 with a B.A. in Linguistics and a minor in Psychology. Two years later she graduated cum laude with an M.A. degree in Linguistics, as well as an M.A. honours degree, from the same university. She is interested in the cognitive processes related to language processing, language production, and language learning both in mono- and bilinguals. Her past research involves work on conceptual representations and cross-language effects, as well as advanced planning in second language sentence production. At Cornell, her research mainly focuses on individual differences, language processing, and language learning. She is also a member of Cornell Cognitive Science.
Juliana Marques de Souza
Juliana (Jules) graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, with a BA in Language and Literature Studies – Teaching Degree, and an MA in Psycholinguistics. She is interested in knowing how humans develop and process language(s), hence the studies on phonemic awareness and reading development and sound symbolism and iconicity. Now she is pursuing her PhD at Cornell where she’ll study the relationship between statistical learning, individual differences and reading. When she is not (happily) being a nerd about science, you can find her watching anime or playing games (mostly Dota 2) with one of her cats on her desk.
Cristian Rivera
Cristian graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a BS in Psychology and a BA in Modern Languages with a concentration in Spanish. He then went on to earn an MS in Psychology from the same university and afterwards served as an adjunct instructor there in the Department of Psychology. Before attending Cornell, Cristian most recently completed an MA in Hispanic Studies at Louisiana State University where he further developed his research interests in language processing and second language acquisition in relation to cognitive and linguistic ability. He is particularly interested in how memory constraints and statistical regularities in language give rise to the chunking of linguistic information and how knowledge of these processes might be used to facilitate language development.
Serene Wang
Serene graduated summa cum laude from Furman University with a BS in psychology and an additional major in Asian Studies. After graduation, she worked as the lab manager in Furman Memory Lab. Serene is interested in the topics of bilingualism and second language acquisition.