Rowan Sommers

Though his high school teachers wanted him to study either French or Latin, Rowan found languages rather boring subjects and, frankly, could not see the appeal of learning how to say the same thing in a different way. The small number of psycholinguistic facts he had to learn during his Bachelor in Psychology did little to persuade him to want to study language either. It was not until he came into contact with other scientific disciplines during his Bachelor and Master in Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience, that he began to see the beauty and wonder of the human capacity for language.

There, he realized that each scientific discipline had invented their own language, with their own technical vocabulary and jargony sentences. Though all of these scientific terms are difficult to learn for budding students, once they master these new concepts, they become capable of talking and thinking about the world in ways they could not fathom before! Rowan has been trying to learn new scientific languages ever since. Having seen the light, in his PhD on the neurobiology of reference, he studies how the brain is capable of identifying and keeping track of the objects and persons that words refer to, in order to learn how language enables us to talk and think about the world.