Alison Mackey is a Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and current Chair of the Linguistics Department. An interdiciplinary scholar, she investigates second language learning across the lifespan, including how additional languages are learned at different ages, looking at both younger and older children, as well as college-age, prime-of-life, and elderly adults. A second area of expertise is quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research design. In recent years her work has branched out to include studies on metaphor, attitudes, and nomenclature. She has published over 100 articles across all of the top scholarly journals in linguistics, as well as in edited collections by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, John Benjamins and others. She has published 19 books in total, three of which deal with researching children’s language learning and teaching. She is one of the series Editors of the Routledge book series Second Language Research. She was Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge University Press’s Annual Review of Applied Linguistics from 2013 to 2024. Google Scholar reports her work has been cited more than 39,300 times in the academic literature (with an i10 index of 132).