Dr Matt Davis and Prof. Paula Buttery join Prof. Brechtje Post as co-Directors of Cambridge Language Sciences (CLS) from June 2022.
We are delighted to welcome Matt Davis and Paula Buttery to the CLS leadership team. They are taking over from Prof. Ann Copestake, who is stepping down as co-Director after five years in the role.
Brechtje Post said “I’d like to express our thanks to Ann for her very significant contribution to Cambridge Language Sciences during her 5 years as co-Director, and for her leadership in developing a strategy for the next phase. I’m very much looking forward to working alongside Matt and Paula to develop new interdisciplinary projects and collaborations.”
Dr Guy Emerson remains in post as Executive Director and will continue to lead in the development of new large-scale interdisciplinary proposals on behalf of CLS.
The new leadership team brings a wealth of language-science research experience from different disciplinary perspectives: linguistics, neuroscience, computer science and psychology.
They will lead CLS in developing new interdisciplinary research activity on ambitious questions and important issues such as AI, online education and communication in the post-pandemic world.
Matt Davis – new co-Director
Matt Davis is a Programme Leader at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. He leads a programme of research on 'Adaptive processing of spoken language', exploring how listeners hear, understand and learn language. His research uses behavioural experiments, brain imaging, brain stimulation and computational modelling.
Paula Buttery – new co-Director
Paula Buttery is Professor of Language and Machine Learning at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. She was Director of the Cambridge Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) from 2018. Her research interests include Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing, cognitive models of language and low resource languages.