About Christina

My name is Christina Bergmann, no middle names. If you google me, you might stumble across some entrepreneurs, journalists or a former German minister for Family. I also have to admit that I did not co-author studies on fibrotic diseases and you cannot vote for me. I also did not come up with Bergmann's rule. That is just my popular name.

I obtained my B.Sc. in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück in 2007. It is a great program which I can only recommend when one is interested in the brain. Just don't be scared by the very interdisciplinary approach, which includes Philosophy, Biology, Computational Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence, among others. During my bachelor studies, I spent an Erasmus semester studying Computational Logic at the New University in Lisbon, one of the most beautiful cities of the world.

Next to my curricular activities, I was also a member of the General Student Board (AStA), where I was, among other things, responsible for assisting students who had to deal with obstacles while pursuing their studies. My goal was to ease access to all parts of the university and of student life. In addition, I worked as test library manager at the department of Psychology.

After my graduation in Osnabrück, I came to the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands to study Cognitive Neuroscience, with a specific focus on Psycholinguistics. After a year of courses and another year of internship at the Baby Research Centre, which led to my Master Thesis, I graduated with a M.Sc. in 2009.

In 2009 I became a PhD student at the Centre for Language Studies (CLS), Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. As a PhD candidate I was affiliated with both the CLS and the International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences. Here I explain what led me to my thesis project. At CLS, I was a member of the research group `First Language Acquisition' led by Prof Paula Fikkert. My PhD project concerned very early first language acquisition and computational modelling and was funded by the Dutch Science Organisation (NWO). I successfully defended on 07.07.2014.

In 2014, the year of my thesis defense, I moved to Paris, France, and now work at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) at Ecole Normale Supérieure. Here I work both at the wonderful babylab and in the modelling team. My project VIOLA tackles the question of how hearing many or few speakers in daily life could influence early language acquisition.

My stay at the LSCP was initially funded by Fondation Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, then Ecole de Neurosciences Paris bridged the time until I started my Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship in September 2015.

In 2017 I returned to the Netherlands for the unique opportunity to work as senior post doc at the brand new Language Development Department of the Max Planck Institute, with the director Prof Caroline Rowland and her fantastic team.

Because being a scientist is more than research output, I started a blog together with my colleague Sho Tsuji and we called it CogTales. It's intended as a platform for junior female cognitive scientists. Comments, feedback, and guest posts are very, very welcome!