Posts Tagged “top-news”
Congratulations to Dr Alan Nielsen, who was awarded his PhD on 10th May – Alan’s thesis was titled “Systematicity, Motivatedness, and the Structure of the Lexicon”, and was supervised by Kenny Smith and Simon Kirby.
We’re evolving! The Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit was established back in 1997 by Jim Hurford and Simon Kirby, and has grown substantially since then to become (we think) the world’s leading group of researchers working on language origins and evolution. To reflect our increased size, and also the increased breadth of the techniques [...]
Kenny has been successful in securing a major 5 year grant from the European Research Council to investigate the Evolution of Linguistic Complexity. Well done, Kenny!
LEC founder Prof. Jim Hurford has been elected to the British Academy, in recognition of his outstanding research. Congratulations Jim!
Congratulations to Dr Bill Thompson, who was awarded his PhD on 25th May – Bill’s thesis was titled “Transmission, Induction, and Evolution”, and was supervised by Kenny Smith and Simon Kirby. Bill is currently working as a post-doc with Bart de Boer in the AI lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Congratulations to Dr Vanessa Ferdinand, who was awarded her PhD on 30th April. Vanessa’s PhD was supervised by Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith, and her thesis was titled “Inductive evolution: cognition, culture and regularity in language”. She is currently an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.
More job news: Justin Sulik, who recently completed his thesis in the LEC (supervised by Kenny and Jim, thesis title “Cognition at the Symbolic Threshold”), is off to join Gary Lupyan’s group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, starting January 2015. Good luck Justin!
Congratulations to Dr Catriona Silvey, who was awarded her PhD on 7th November. Cat did her PhD with Kenny Smith and Simon Kirby, on “The communicative emergence and cultural evolution of word meanings”; since her viva she has been working in the Goldin-Meadow lab at the University of Chicago.
Very best of luck to Vanessa Ferdinand, Catriona Silvey and Bill Thompson, who have finished up their PhDs in the LEC and headed off to fantastic post-doc positions elsewhere. Vanessa (thesis title: “Inductive Evolution: the cognitive explanation of cultural change and regularity in language”) is off to the Santa Fe Institute, to take up an Omidyar [...]
Congratulations to Dr James Thomas and Dr Justin Sulik, who were awarded their PhDs this week. James did his PhD with Simon Kirby and Richard Shillcock (Informatics), on “Self-domestication and Language Evolution”; since his PhD he has been working as a post-doc with Richard. Justin was supervised by Kenny Smith and Jim Hurford, and his [...]