Official Story
Liina Pylkkänen is a Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at New York University. She is the director of the NYU Neurolinguistics Laboratory and a co-director of the Neuroscience of Language Laboratory at NYUNYC and NYU Abu Dhabi. She also directs the magnetoencephalography (MEG) facility in the Psychology Department of New York University. Prof. Pylkkänen received her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted her post-doctoral work at New York University. Her research addresses the brain bases of language processing, with a focus on semantic cognition. Starting in the late 1990's, she and a handful of other researchers began to pioneer the use of MEG to characterize the brain mechanisms of language. Today, she has generated a systematic body of MEG research on multiple linguistic processing levels. This year, she was elected as president of the Society of the Neurobiology of Language and has in recent years spent significant effort on science communication, for example by starting a public YouTube channel on the neurobiology of language and a lab podcast.
Unofficial Story
I grew up in Tampere, Finland, as the only child of a single mother, who was a nurse. As soon as I started a foreign language in school, at the age of 8, I knew I had a talent for language. I freaked out my English teacher with my perfect American accent - he was teaching in a British accent, but I liked the one I heard on TV better, and somehow was able to copy it effortlessly. I took the rather typical load of four foreign languages over the years, and at the end of high school, told my guidance counselor that I wanted language to be my job, somehow. She told me that language shouldn't be the core of my job, rather, I should find a career in which I could use a lot of languages. I said no, language will be my job. So I applied to the English Philology department in the University of Tampere, and made it, which was a huge accomplishment since the acceptance rate to that program was extremely low. There I found out that Linguistics exists, and immediately applied to be an exchange student in the US, since it didn't exist very much in Finland. I left Finland when I was 20 and landed in the University of Pittsburgh in fall 1994. I felt intellectually born and I immediately knew that I was not going to go back to Finland. But figuring out a way to stay past my exchange year was a real struggle. During my exchange year, I was taking MA classes at the Pitt Department of Linguistics, so I thought I should be an MA student there. But I was rejected, since I didn't have an undergrad degree. I fought to get into that program like my life depended on it, sitting in the Dean's office explaining my passion, and eventually it worked! But I still had no funding. By the end of the year, I had managed to secure half-time funding working in a computational linguistics lab and then took a loan from Finland to make up for the rest. After that, things went smoothly, my funding was extended to full time, and I got in to all the PhD programs I applied for. I arrived at MIT wanting to do nothing but formal semantics, but after the first year, I needed a summer job, and an RAship was available in an MEG lab that had just arrived to the department...and the rest is history! The hardest struggle of my personal and professional life, by far, has been to have a child. Throughout my Assistant Professor years, I was completely drugged up on fertility treatments. It's a miracle I was able to have a straight thought. We knew our son would be called Nooa and our daughter Nella. One month after I got tenure, I was finally also pregnant. That year, we also received funding from the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute to start our lab there. Today, together with my husband-bestfriend-colleague-coPI, I have an 11-year old son Nooa and an 11-year old lab NeLLab (Neuroscience of Language Lab), our two greatest joys.