About Me
Nice to meet you! Please call me Sandy: it's the Scottish nickname for Alexander, which is my given (and publishing) name. But everyone calls me Sandy, and as my research shows, the names we use matter.
I'm a cognitive scientist studying the development of language and cognition. I'm interested in how humans learn language and how learning language influences the way we learn about everything else. My work has been supported by NIH and NSF fellowships and published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy, Cognition, and Developmental Science.
Currently, I work with John Trueswell and Charles Yang as a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania, studying the mechanisms of word learning in children and adults.
I received my Ph.D. at Northwestern University, working with Sandra Waxman, Lance Rips, and Adriana Weisleder. My dissertation examined how labeling objects changes the way infants remember and categorize them.
