I am a post-doctoral researcher in Pia Knoeferle’s Language & Cognition group at Bielefeld University. We are part of the Cluster of Excellence on Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) there, which makes it a very interdisciplinary and exciting place to work - you’re always bumping into a new generation of insect robots, or being asked to hold a conversation with a virtual agent waving from a screen on the wall.

My own research focuses on human-human interaction, and especially on how seeing where your conversational partner is looking helps you to understand what they are saying (you can read about this here). I completed my PhD on this topic at the University of Edinburgh, Department of Psychology. Before that, I studied Linguistics and Psychology at the University of Münster. There, Pienie Zwitserlood’s lab was where I became interested in the interplay of language and visual attention, and where I first learnt about eyetracking and running psycholinguistic experiments.

Recently, I helped organise the 2011 workshop on Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP) at the ZiF in Bielefeld. I was also part of an interdisciplinary team hosting one stream at the CITEC Summer School on Mechanisms of Attention. Currently, a group of us are preparing a “spring school” on mixed models in psycholinguistics (BiMM 2012). 

I have a CiteULike library reflecting what I am (or would like to be) interested in at the moment; you can read more about my academic interests here. Since I’m often away at the weekends, I’m afraid I haven’t yet explored everything that Bielefeld has to offer, but I definitely enjoy singing in the Konzertchor.