Brian Dillon returning as Professor

Doing psycholinguistics with the help of AI.

We are delighted, deliriously so, to welcome back Brian Dillon *11 to UMD, now as Professor of Linguistics and faculty at the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), beginning in August 2027!

Brian first came to Maryland in 2005, with a BA in Linguistics from SUNY Buffalo, as a post-baccalaureate research assistant with support from Dave Baggett. He worked with Colin Phillips and postdoc Ming Xiang, now David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, on illusory licensing in negative polarity item (NPI) dependencies, using both behavioral and electrophysiological measures, as well as with visitor Andrew Nevins (UCL) and PhD student Shiti Malhotra *11 on the processing of Hindi agreement and tense. 

Then in 2007 we welcomed Brian into our PhD program. He soon received two years of support as part of our NSF-IGERT grant (DGE-0801465), and at the end of his second year received a grant from the NSF's East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for U.S. Graduate Students program (EAPSI-091387), to study the "Memory Dynamics in the Processing of Chinese Anaphors", spending part of 2009 as a Visiting Scholar at Beijing Normal University. Finally, in just his fourth year, Brian defended a dissertation on memory access during the construction of long-distance dependencies in online sentence comprehension, the perfectly titled Structured Access in Sentence Comprehension. On the committee were Colin as Chair, Norbert, Bill and Jeff, plus Robert DeKeyser representing the Graduate School.

PhD in hand, Dr. Dillon *11 immediately became Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 – winning an Outstanding Teacher Award that same year – and to Full Professor in 2024. During his fifteen years at UMass, Brian has been Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on four major research grants from the NSF – BCS-1941485, BCS-2020945 with Tal Linzen (NYU), BCS-2146798 with Aya Meltzer-Asscher (Tel Aviv), and IIS-2504954 – the last of them still ongoing, and four Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grants with his students: Sakshi Bhatia (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Delhi), Rodica Ivan (Acuity Insights), fellow Baggett Fellow alumnus Christopher Hammerly (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of British Columbia), and Anissa Neal. He has published dozens of major articles – in Cognition, Cognitive Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and very often the Journal of Memory and Language, among several other venues – and in 2020 he joined Fernanda Ferreira to found Glossa Psycholinguistics, where he remains Co-Editor-in-Chief. Very recently Brian published two encylopedic reviews of his field: one on Syntactic Dependency Formation in Sentence Processing in the Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Syntax with former UMass postdoc Maayan Keshev (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and one on Sentence Processing in the MIT Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science with frequent collaborator Matt Wagers *08, Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz, who defended his UMD dissertation at the end of Brian's first year in our PhD program.

Now, beginning in the Fall of 2027, Brian will re-join our department, a onetime Terp born anew, and we could not be happier!