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Monika Abels received her PhD from the University of Osnabrück in Germany and is a cross-cultural, developmental psychologist. She has worked on infants' daily experiences and caregiving since her time as an exchange student in Gujarat, India, in 1998. Her current research interests include the development of shared attention and communication. She has recently conducted a project at Tilburg University (funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship) on a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania using new, portable technology that records language, heart rate and caregivers' distances from the observed infant. She is also interested in aspects of cultural change due to changes in lifestyle and technology.
Iulia Bădescu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montreal, Canada. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, and an MA and BSc from the University of Calgary. She currently studies wild chimpanzees in Uganda and has worked on ursine colobus monkeys in Ghana. Her research focuses on identifying the key differences and similarities between primates in infant care, development and maternal investment to evaluate the dynamic evolutionary processes that have shaped variable patterns of infant feeding and care in our own species.
Peter Bierbaumer pursued degrees in English, German and Russian studies at the University of Vienna and the University of Graz before completing a PhD in English and German studies at the University of Graz in 1969. After his habilitation in the field of English linguistics in 1979, he worked as a researcher and professor at the Department of English Studies at the University of Graz until his retirement in 2007. His main research interests include historical linguistics, with a particular focus on Old English, and English for specific purposes. Besides serving in several university functions, Peter Bierbaumer was one of the initiators of the Graz International Bilingual School and also founded the International Language Centre at the University of Graz.
Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus at Durham University, England, and Guest Professor at Luxembourg University. He has worked in initial teacher training and doctoral supervision, and taught courses on intercultural competence. He has researched bilingual and minority education, residence abroad for language students and intercultural competence in foreign language learning.
Nancy Campbell has a PhD from Strathclyde University and has been teaching linguistics and English language at the University of Graz since the mid-80s. Her main interest is in developing innovative approaches to teaching academic writing and in developing effective methods of assessing writing. She is also academic coordinator of a Joint Master's program which is run in conjunction with universities in Bamberg, New York, Paris, Pécs and Venice.
Fabiana Cardetti is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Graduate Director for Instructional Development at the University of Connecticut, USA. She has extensive experience in mathematics education research, with a recent focus in supporting the enactment of mathematical practices to enhance students' understanding of mathematics through an ICC lens. Currently, she leads and co-leads several major interdisciplinary initiatives for the mathematics education of teachers and the improvement of mathematics teaching and learning across different educational levels. She holds a PhD in mathematics, specializing in control theory on Lie groups, from Louisiana State University.
Piera Filippi received a PhD in philosophy of language and mind at the University of Palermo, Italy, in 2012. From 2012 to 2016, she conducted her postdoctoral research project at the department of Cognitive Biology of the University of Vienna, Austria, at the Artificial language laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is currently conducting her research work at the Brain and Language Research Institute of the University of Aix-Marseille, France. Her research focuses on the analysis of prosody, emotion communication and language evolution through a comparative approach between human and nonhuman animals.
Bruno Gingras first completed an MSc in molecular biology before turning to music theory, graduating with a PhD from McGill University, Canada, in 2008. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, United Kingdom, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Cognitive Biology of the University of Vienna, Austria, from 2011 to 2014. He is currently a University Assistant at the Department of Psychology of the University of Innsbruck in Austria. His research interests include biomusicology, music-induced emotions and music performance.
Adolf Heschl is an evolutionary biologist working on questions about cognitive evolution in humans and animals. He was trained in zoology and botany at the University of Graz in Austria and was a member of the so-called “Altenberger Kreis” around Konrad Lorenz, Karl Popper and Rupert Riedl, whose work was focused on the development of an evolutionary account of epistemology. As a result, he published a book entitled The Intelligent Genome (1998) in which he defends the position that most behavior is genetically determined. In recent years he has been active in the emerging field of microbiome research.
Annette Hohenberger is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. She has a twofold academic background and holds degrees in linguistics (MA, PhD) and psychology (diploma, habilitation). Her main research areas are cognitive development (episodic cognition, theory of mind, understanding of goal-directed human action), language and emotional development. With adults, she studies psycholinguistics (language perception and production, sign language), cognition/perception/action, time perception, as well as reasoning about climate change and sustainability. Conceptually and methodologically, she has worked in an interdisciplinary perspective and subscribes to a nonlinear dynamic systems approach, in particular in relation to language development.
Milena Kong-Insam received a PhD in English Studies and teaches English linguistics and language at the University of Graz in Austria. Her research areas are acoustic phonetics and phonology, with a special focus on foreign language acquisition. Her PhD project dealt with comparing acoustically measurable cues of accentedness, with a focus on sound segments, and current research interests also include suprasegmentals, such as tones and pitch contours. She has been working on an interdepartmental project which is testing and implementing an innovative pronunciation training software for L2 learners of English. She was nominated for Ars Docendi (i.e., state award for excellence in teaching) by the University of Graz in 2013.
Katja Liebal is a Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her main research focus is on the gestural and facial communication of nonhuman primates and how informed, systematic comparisons with human non-verbal communication help shed light on the origins of human language. She uses both observational and non-invasive experimental methods to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying primate communication and how different communicative means are acquired during ontogeny.
Eva Maria Luef is a faculty member at the College of Education at Seoul National University in South Korea. Her research focuses on the acoustics of sounds in connection with cognitive science, and she has studied communication in great apes, corvids and humans. She conducts observational and experimental studies involving both work in the lab and in the field. The two main strands of her work, anthropology and linguistics, help answer the larger question of how communicative systems adapt to evolutionary pressures.
Manuela M. Marin has a multidisciplinary academic background and received degrees in English, physics and musicology from the University of Graz, Austria, and an MSc in psychological research methods from Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is currently finishing her PhD studies in psychology at the University of Vienna and working as a University Assistant at the Department of Psychology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research interests include empirical aesthetics, music and emotion as well as music-language comparisons. She is a co-founder and promoter of the annual conference series “International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus)”, which has been running for more than ten years.
Georg Marko studied English and American Studies at the Universities of Graz and Lancaster and is now an Associate Professor of English Linguistics in Graz. His main area of expertise is the theory, the methodology and the application of corpus-based critical discourse analysis. His research is mainly concerned with expert and lay discourses on health, especially in connection with medicalization and the construction of risk. He is also interested in the interaction between language and different social phenomena and domains and has organized several workshops on this topic (language in connection with sexuality, religion, health, mobility and populism, respectively).
Elliot Murphy is a PhD candidate at the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, University of Westminster, UK. His research is concerned with copredication, semantic development, language deficits in autism and schizophrenia and neural oscillations.
Margit Reitbauer has been working at the University of Graz for over twenty years, is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Department of English Studies and also the head of the Language Department, where she coordinates, among other things, the “Ergänzungsfach Europa: Sprachen, Wirtschaft, Recht.” Recently, she has been named Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Graz. In her habilitation treatise, she investigated the reading behavior of EFL learners in online texts through the use of eye-tracking. Her main research interests include reading research, computer-mediated communication (hypertexts and internet linguistics) as well as discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.
Pia Resnik is a Senior Lecturer in English language teaching and applied linguistics at the Department of English at the University of Vienna, Austria. Previously, she worked at the Departments of English Studies in Graz and Salzburg, Austria, and spent research visits at Newcastle University, UK, the University of London, UK, and Kasetsart University, Thailand. Her research interests include all aspects surrounding learning of English as a foreign language, with a particular focus on emotions in multilingual contexts. Recently, she has started investigating the effect of tandem language learning on foreign language enjoyment, foreign language anxiety, and learner autonomy, in a joint-project with King's College London, UK. She is the author of the book Multilinguals' Verbalisation and Perception of Emotions (2018).
Johannes A. Scherling studied English and American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria, and finished his diploma in 2005 before acquiring his PhD in 2009. His areas of expertise include thematic and framing analysis of media texts and the pragmatics of language contact between English and Japanese. He has been on numerous research stays in Japan and is currently working as a lecturer in the areas of English linguistics and British cultural studies at the University of Graz and as an external lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
Sabrina Turker is recipient of a Doc-team fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and currently working at the Centre for Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz, Austria. After completing a teaching degree in English and French Studies and a Bachelor's degree in linguistics, she was a full-time teacher for several years. In the past three years, she has continued working as a teacher in adult education and with refugees and completed internships at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig (2016) and the University Hospital Heidelberg (2015) whilst working on her PhD project. At the moment, she is collaborating on different projects related to ordinal number processing, dyslexia and is finishing her PhD thesis “The neuroanatomical correlates of foreign language aptitude and musicality”.
Robert Ullrich is a pre-doctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. During his undergraduate and graduate years he worked in the Biology Department in the group led by Constance Scharff, focusing on multimodal communication in songbirds. Currently he is doing research for his PhD thesis in the group led by Katja Liebal studying primate communication research. His cross-species and cross-disciplinary background, which also includes studies in philosophy of science and language, motivated his current meta-research stance to investigate the role of values in science by using a mixed-method approach.
Mariek Vanden Abeele has a PhD from the University of Leuven, Belgium, and is Assistant Professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She is also an affiliated researcher at the Media & ICT research group at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research is centered on the social implications of mobile communication technology, with a particular focus on children and youths. She serves as editor on the board of Mobile Media & Communication (Sage) and is the secretary of the Mobile Interest Group of the International Communication Association.
Helma van Meijl graduated from Tilburg University in August 2017 with an MSc, having worked on smartphone use during parent-child interactions in her thesis. Before she went on to obtain her Master's in business communication and digital media, she studied commercial economics at Fontys Hogescholen and had a job in marketing and PR for a large bookstore in Eindhoven. Currently she is working as an (online) marketer at Acknowledge, a large ICT firm in the province of North-Brabant, the Netherlands.
Toke van Telgen obtained her Master's degree in communication and information sciences at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, in August 2017. Her thesis focused on the influence of smartphone use on parental responsiveness and, in turn, on child development. Prior to her Master's degree, she studied communication science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Aside from her communications studies, she worked at several advertising agencies and advised companies as a freelance communications consultant. Currently she is working at the Marketing & Communications department of Berenschot, an independent management consultancy firm in the Netherlands.
Wolfgang Viereck is Professor Emeritus of the English Department at the University Bamberg, Germany. His expertise is linguistics with a special focus on the history of the English language. After studying English at the universities in Hamburg and Mainz, he specialized in dialectology and did extensive research in the area of anglicisms in German (and in particular Austrian). During his long scientific career, he published in high-profile journals, authored many books and received numerous academic honors from various universities.
Manuela Wagner is Associate Professor of Foreign Language Education in the Department of Literatures, Cultures at the University of Connecticut, USA. She holds an M.A in English studies and marketing and a Ph.D. in English Studies with a specialization in linguistics from the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests include pragmatic development in first and second language acquisition, the development of intercultural competence and citizenship in education, communicative development in special circumstances, and humor in education and across cultures. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues from different areas of specializations and in a variety of contexts on integrating theory in practice.
Ute Wimmer studied English and American Studies and mathematics at the University of Graz and taught several linguistic courses at the Department of English Studies. Encouraged by Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf, she became interested in the dynamics of language death and revival and presented her research project at an international conference of minority languages. In her doctoral thesis, which was published by the Cornish Language Board (2010), she assessed the sociolinguistic situation of the revived Cornish language. She is currently teaching English and mathematics at a college for elementary education in Linz, Austria.