I was born in Minsk, Belarus -- that's here . I emigrated to the US with my family in 1990, settling in New York. I attended Stuyvesant High School and then Cornell University. At Cornell, somewhat through a process of elimination, I ended up doing an independent major in Cogntive Science. In my final year, I was a research assistant for Shimon Edelman and then Morten Christiansen, with whom I completed an undergraduate honors thesis that included an exploration of the evolution of word-orders among the world's languages using a neural network (connectionist) model.

Following Cornell, I moved to Pittsburgh to work with Jay McClelland at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition on computational models that explored the interplay between pressures on language to be easily produced and easily comprehended (e.g., using principles of minimum description length). I then applied to graduate programs in Cognitive Psychology and decided to remain in Pittsburgh. I completed my graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University under the advisorship of Jay McClelland and defended my dissertation in August of 2007. My main research topic during grad school concerned the cognitive functions of language (what does language do other than allow us to communicate?).

From 2007-2008 I came back to Cornell as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher working with Michael Spivey on projects relating to the effects of verbal labels (words) on visual processing. I also spent some time at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. From April-August, 2008 I was itinerant, attending conferences and workshops, and spending time with collaborators (Memphis, NIH, UC Merced, Stanford). In September, 2008 I started a position as an IGERT fellow at the University of Pennsylvania working with Sharon Thompson-Schill and Dan Swingley. In July, 2010 I moved to Madison, WI where I am an assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Other fun things: My academic genealogy!