Jun.-Prof. Dr. Pia Knoeferle

Pia Knoeferle graduated in English Philology, Romance Studies, Philosophy (M.A.), and in English, French, and Sports ("1. Staatsexamen", a teaching degree) from the University of Regensburg, Germany. She received a PhD in Computational Linguistics from Saarland University Germany in 2005. In her PhD thesis Pia Knoeferle examined the effects of scene information on language comprehension by monitoring where people look in a scene as they listen to related speech. She graduated "summa cum laude" and was awarded the Eduard-Martin Prize for outstanding dissertations at Saarland University. The experiments from her PhD research, as well as collaborative computational modeling research were published in international journals (e.g., Cognition, Cognitive Science, Journal of Memory & Language, Cerebral Cortex, Psychophysiology). After a two-year postdoc position at Saarland University (2005-2007), she was awarded an independent two-year postdoctoral fellowship by the German Research Council which she held at the University of California, San Diego (2007-2008). During that time she founded a workshop series "Embodied and situated language processing" which has since taken place in Saarbrücken (2007), Rotterdam (2009), San Diego (2010), and most recently in Bielefeld at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (2010). In January 2009 she moved back to Germany from San Diego as a newly appointed Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessorin) in the Cognitive Interaction Technology Excellence Center at Bielefeld University.