Prospective PhD Students:
I will be recruiting students during the Fall 2025 PhD admissions cycle, through the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University. If you are interested in working with me as PhD student, please submit your application through the Georgetown University application portal. Make sure you apply to the “computational linguistics” concentration. The deadline is December 1st, 2025. More information can be found at this link.
PhD Topics: The best way to get a sense of the topics I am likely to supervise is to take a look at my recent publications. Below is a partial list of my current foci.
• Computational models of language processing (particularly language comprehension)
• Data-efficient machine learning and its applications to language acquisition
• Information theory and its applications to linguistics, broadly
• Understanding the role of (multi)modality in language processing
Generally, I am not a great fit for applicants interested in multilingualism, low-resource languages, or machine translation. (These are great topics, but just not my area of expertise!) My colleague, Nathan Schneider has authored a great blog post about putting together a statement of purpose for PhD applications.
Background: My research is interdisciplinary, meaning I am interested in working with students from different intellectual backgrounds. If you have experience in either linguistics, experimental psychology, or computer science (especially natural language processing and machine learning), then you are likely a good fit!
Prospective Postdocs:
If you have recently graduated with a PhD in linguistics NLP, or related field, and are interested in doing a postdoc at PICoL / Georgetown Linguistics, please send me an email. Currently, I am not advertising for a postdoc position. However, if it's a good fit, I am happy to jointly explore funding opportunities.
Prospective Masters Students:
The computational linguistics program at Georgetown offers a masters degree, with an option to conduct original research as part of a masters thesis project. If you have less research experience, this program may be an ideal way to get started in the CL / NLP field. Prospective students should apply through the linguistics masters program.
Undergraduate Students:
If you are an undergraduate student at Georgetown, interested in getting involved with research, please send me an email! Typically, the best way to start out is to attend PICoL Lab meetings, to get a sense of the research we do. (Generally, I do not have the bandwidth to supervise non-Georgetown undergraduates.)