Advising

(Note on email: On the one hand, email is the best way to reach me and lots of other professors, but on the other hand, it often feels impossible to keep up with email and also to be a great advisor, teacher, and researcher to the people we already work with, so emails do frequently slip through the cracks. Please don't feel awkward about following up if it's been more than a week and you haven't received a response!)

Prospective PhD students: I primarily advise graduate students through the PhD program in Linguistics at Harvard. Most students I advise are interested in questions in formal semantics and pragmatics, from a crosslinguistic theoretical and/or experimental perspective. Students who want to connect linguistic theories of meaning to broader work in cognitive science (from a psychological and/or philosophical perspective) are an especially excellent fit. Although most students in our lab work on spoken languages, I am especially interested in sign languages as a language family, so students with prior experience in sign language linguistics from either a formal and/or experimental perspective and some fluency in a sign language, whether or not they've worked in semantics, are also an excellent fit. Students who are primarily interested in online language processing projects and neurolinguistics, or primarily on language acquisition, might be best served by applying to our Psychology PhD to work with Prof. Snedeker and/or Prof. Bergelson, although I am always happy to serve a second mentor/PhD committee member to these students; interaction between Ling and Psych is lively at Harvard, and we hold a longstanding joint weekly LangCog speaker dinner series. There is no particular advantage to reaching out via email before you apply to the PhD program, although if you do have specific questions about our lab not available on this website, I will do my best to answer them via email. You may also contact our current Director of Graduate Studies for general information about applying. Two notes on our PhD applications: the GRE is now optional, but we do really want to know why our program would be the right fit for your goals, so take care to explain this in your statement of purpose. I'd also strongly encourage you to reach out to current students to learn more about both our lab and our PhD program!

Prospective Postdocs: Recent PhDs with experience in (i) experimental semantics, (ii) formal semantics and its interfaces with other aspects of cognition including pragmatics, syntax, and reasoning, and/or (iii) semantics in sign languages make excellent fits for a postdoctoral position in our lab. We are also embedded in a department with strengths in fieldwork, a campus full of people excited to collaborate on issues in language and cognition, and a Boston area research community with strengths in linguistics broadly and in semantics and sign linguistics specifically. If you're interested in potentially doing a postdoc at Harvard related to work in the M&M lab, let's discuss possible avenues for funding at least a full semester before you'd be looking to start. 

Prospectives research assistants/co-ops: We've benefitted immensely from research assistants joining our lab over the years, many of whom go on to graduate school in linguistics or other fields. RAs with fluency in ASL who are interested in learning more about the process of linguistics research are always welcome to get in touch with either me or our current lab manager to learn more about these paid (but usually part-time) opportunities. RA positions related to experimental semantics without fluency in ASL are typically reserved for our undergraduates in the Linguistics program here at Harvard (if you're a linguistics concentrator, please reach out!), but occasional exceptions can be made, especially for students with a particular interest in semantics who may not have access to Linguistics research in their current program of studies. It's worth noting we do not have any remote RA positons.

(Mostly) up to date information about research topics in the M&M lab can be found on our lab research page.