I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I am also a collaborator in the Cortical Systems Lab at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

I use neuroimaging  combined with behavioral and computational methods to investigate the neural basis of language. I am interested in understanding how semantic knowledge and concepts are stored and accessed across various tasks and sensory modalities. I am also interested in the mechanisms that support lexical selection, and how they interact with semantic knowledge. 

I obtained my PhD at New York University where I worked in the Neuroscience of Language Lab supervised by Liina Pylkkänen.  I completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and a BA in Psychology, with a Minor in Philosophy, from the American University of Beirut. 

email: jdirani@andrew.cmu.edu
twitter: @DiraniJulien