Howdy!

I’m Cassandra Jacobs. I am an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo in the Department of Linguistics, where I run the Computational Linguistics and Cognition (CaLiCo) Lab.

My Research

My research focuses on the intersection between linguistic experience, memory, and language processing, especially how short- and long-term language statistics influence language production. My modeling work aims to extract useful (vector) representations of word forms, word meanings, and word meanings in context that are learned over large written and spoken corpora. You can also check out experiment materials, posters, and analyses on my github and at OSF.

About me

Originally from Texas, I resolved to like the cold and received my PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Illinois as well as my MS in Computer Science. From 2016-2018 I worked as an NLP data scientist, but realized I still wanted to keep doing research, so I left that role and was an affiliated researcher in the Ferreira Lab at UC Davis. I then completed two wonderful years as a postdoctoral research associate in the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of Wisconsin where I studied the relationship between learning and language production supported by NSF grant 1849236. In my spare time, I like going on wilderness backpacking trips, knitting, swimming, and learning (+about) languages.

As a former data scientist, I actively work to maintain bridges between academic research and industry, and am happy to meet with others to discuss the academic to non-academic career transition process. You can read more about these issues in my brief article in Nature Human Behavior. I love seeing linguists and cognitive psychologists land their dream jobs, so contact me if you’d like to let me know about any opportunities I should forward along.

If you have any questions or would like to request more information about any of the projects I am working on or the resources behind them, I like e-mail — cxjacobs@buffalo.edu.

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