Opportunities Sessions

Candice Frances is a researcher in language learning and psycholinguistics with experience working across the United States, Spain, Argentina, the Netherlands, and (briefly) Wales. They completed their PhD at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) in Spain and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

Alongside their research, Candice has been actively involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion, science communication, and academic service. At the Max Planck Institute, they chaired the DEI Committee and developed and led the Talent+ program bringing research interns from the Global South to the institute. Their broader science-adjacent work has included serving as Scientific Coordinator of the Network of Argentine Scientists and Researchers in the Netherlands (RCAPB), co-organizing Brain Awareness Week activities, and presenting research to public audiences through initiatives such as Pint of Science. Their international and interdisciplinary experience has given them particular insight into navigating academic applications, CVs, and career opportunities across different countries and systems.

Savannah Lewis is a metascientist and Doctoral Candidate in Experimental Psychology at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on research integrity, open science, reproducibility, and how people perceive science and scientists. She is a Co-Director of the Psychological Science Accelerator, an international research network connecting researchers across more than 70 countries, where she helps coordinate large-scale research collaborations and initiatives. Her work has given her extensive experience building international research partnerships, coordinating Big Team Science projects, and developing collaborative research opportunities across institutions and countries.

I am Professor of Developmental Psycholinguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany. The long-term goal of my research program is to understand which universal abilities influence language acquisition and how these abilities interact with experience, leading to variability or similarities in the language acquisition trajectory.  

My lab focuses on the experimental study of early language acquisition, with a special focus on phonological and lexical acquisition. We pursue a comparative psycholinguistics approach, and compare infants learning different native languages, and infants growing up multilingually, and we study populations, for whom language development is atypical. We have a special interest in understudied languages and understudied populations. My lab is the first worldwide that studies infant language development in infants growing up in Subsahara Africa and South-East Asia. For this, we extend our lab-based methods to the field (e.g., mobile eye-tracking), for example in collaboration with researchers at the University of Ghana, Legon. 

I am Associate Editor of the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. I am Co-Director of the Potsdam BabyLAB and of the IDEALAB International Graduate Program.

I am Professor of Linguistics in Boulder, Director of the Language, Development, and Cognition Lab, and Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science. My research areas include semantics-pragmatics, first language acquisition, and the language-cognition interface from a crosslinguistic perspective with a focus on Hindi and Tamil. During my tenure at the Max Planck Institute, I constructed two large-scale longitudinal, audio-visual corpora of child-caregiver interactions in Hindi and Tamil that form the basis for a long-running project on the acquisition of word meaning and argument structure in the two languages. 

I have co-edited a book and special issues in journals including Events of Putting and Taking (with Anetta Kopecka, John Benjamins, 2012), The Linguistic Encoding of Multiple-Participant Events (with Sonja Eisenbeiss and Penelope Brown, Special Issue of Linguistics, 2007), The Acquisition of Information Structure (with Christine Dimroth, Special Issue of Linguistics Vanguard, 2018), and Embodied Cognition and Language (with Mutsumi Imai and Eliana Colunga, Special Issue of Languages, 2019). My work also appears in a variety of journals including Cognition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Journal of Child Language, Language Acquisition, Cognitive Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Linguistics, and Lingua.