Jorien de Keijzer
Role: PhD student member (Chair)
Interests: Polarization, Conversation Analysis, and Social Psychology
About: Jorien is an interdisciplinary PhD student, studying polarization through the use of conversation analysis and social psychology. By combining these two disciplines she aims to find trigger points which (de)polarize small-group interactions.
María Pilar Uribe Silva
Role: PhD student member (Communications)
Interests: Journalism, Sustainability, Language Awareness, and Computational Linguistics
About: María Pilar is a journalist specializing in sustainability communication and fact-checking. Her interdisciplinary PhD project focuses on identifying deceptive language in sustainability reports using large language models (LLMs). Her research bridges communication studies, computational linguistics, and critical language awareness, aiming to enhance transparency and accountability in environmental reporting.
Jo-Anne van der Sluijs
Role: PhD student member (Finances)
Interests: Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Language Disorders
About: Jo-Anne is a first-year PhD candidate with IDEALAB, a joint degree programme with mobility between the University of Groningen and Macquarie University. Her research focuses on the interpretation of associative networks that are used to study the structure of the mental lexicon.
Sijbren van Vaals
Role: PhD student member (Website)
Interests: Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology, and Psycholinguistics
About: Sijbren is a first-year PhD student within the department of Computational Linguistics researching Dutch news accessibility in the PAGINA project. His research aims to improve Dutch news accessibility and readability, specifically for low-literate demographics, through simplifying, summarising, and altering the perspective and frame of a given text.
Zhixing Han
Role: PhD student member (Secretary)
Interests: Second-Language Development, and Writing
About: Zhixing is a second-year PhD student in the Applied Linguistics department. Her work focuses on discovering the development of second language writing processes of L1 Chinese L2 English learners and the association of the development with the individual differences, such as working memory and motivation.
Runyu Wu
Role: PhD student member (Registration and Payment)
Interests: English Accents, Perception, Intelligibility, and Phonology
About: Runyu is a first-year PhD student in the Department of European Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the intelligibility and perception of different English accents and explores whether targeted teaching can improve the intelligibility of the trained varieties and also generalize to other accented varieties of English.
Maria Polychronidou
Role: PhD student member (Communications)
Interests: Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Aging, Linguistic Decline, and Idioms
About: Maria Polychronidou is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and Ghent University, specializing in linguistics with a focus on cognitive aging. As a member of the Semantics and Cognition Lab, Maria's research employs methodologies such as EEG and eye-tracking to investigate how cognitive aging influences idiom comprehension and usage.
Simone Sprenger
Role: Coordinating staff member
Interests: Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Aging, Linguistic Change, Idioms, and Speaking
About: Simone Sprenger is an assistant professor at the Center for Language and Cognition, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen. She teaches psycholinguistics in undergraduate and (research) master programs. Her research is embedded in the Semantics and Cognition Lab (chair: prof. Petra Hendriks) and focuses on ambiguity processing across the lifespan, in particular related to figurative language.