Research Roundtable 2015: Preparing for your Academic Interview

Research Roundtable Series:

Preparing for your Academic Interview with Jeffrey Elman, PhD

The Research Roundtable 2015 will focus on perspectives from faculty about the various aspects of being on the academic job market; from their job search experiences to the interview process. Throughout, the faculty members will talk about best practices and lessons learned to help you navigate the academic career path.

The speaker will give a short presentation and then open the topic up for Q & A. This event is limited to 20 postdoctoral scholars and a light lunch will be provided. If you attend, please be willing to participate in the discussion.

This month will feature Jeffrey Elman, Distinguished Prof. of Social Sciences, Co-Director of Kavli Institute for Brain & Mind and Director of Online and Technology Enhanced Education, to discuss how to prepare for your academic interview.

Speaker Bio:

Jeffrey L. Elman has made several major contributions to the theoretical foundations of human cognition, most notably in the areas of language and development. His work has had an immense impact across fields as diverse as cognitive science, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, computer science and linguistics. Elman’s 1990 paper Finding Structure in Time [1] introduced a new way of thinking about language knowledge, language processing, and language learning based on distributed representations in connectionist networks. The paper is listed as one of the 10 most-cited papers in the field of psychology between 1990 and 1994, and the most often cited paper in psycholinguistics in that period. This work, together with earlier Elman’s earlier work on speech perception and subsequent work on learnability, representation, innateness, and development, continues to shape the research agendas of researchers in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and many other fields.

Elman received his Bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1969 and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas in 1977. That same year he joined the faculty at UC San Diego, where he has remained ever since, first in the department of Linguistics and subsequently as a founding member of the Department of Cognitive Science. He was Founding Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Mind and Brain, and was Dean of Social Sciences from 2006 to 2014. He is now Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science.