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Zed Sevcikova-Sehyr is an Assistant Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders in Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University. She earned her Ph.D. from University College London (UCL) in Cognitive, Perceptual, and Brain Sciences. Her research centers at the intersection of linguistics, cognition, and neuroscience. Dr. Sehyr’s research examines the neural underpinnings of visual language processing and reading. She investigates how our experiences shape visual and language networks and how these pathways adapt to deafness or sign language experience. Dr. Sehyr is a co-developer of ASL-LEX, a lexical database for American Sign Language. Her most recent work utilises computer-assisted analyses and machine learning to advance linguistic research.
Lee Kezar is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southern California and Graduate Research Assistant in the GLAMOR Lab under Dr. Jesse Thomason. Their research focuses on computational-linguistic methods for modeling American Sign Language (ASL) from the perspectives of phonology and lexical semantics, leveraging expert knowledge bases like ASL-LEX and free association data to improve automatic perception, comprehension, and production skills in ASL. Lee's previous work includes resources like the Sem-Lex Benchmark (91k isolated sign productions for over 3k distinct lexical items) and the ASL Knowledge Graph for building explainable, state-of-the-art models for recognizing and understanding rare and unseen signs. Starting August 2025, Lee will be joining the Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) at Gallaudet University as a full-time postdoctoral researcher focusing on AI-powered collaborative learning tools for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in STEM.
Simon De Deyne is a cognitive scientist at the University of Melbourne, working at the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Complex Human Data Hub at the School of Psychological Sciences. He is interested in how the mind acquires and represents word meaning through experiences with the world and the use of language. His current work addresses questions about how connotative meaning varies across different languages and cultures, and how bilinguals learn and represent word meaning. One of his longest-running projects is the Small World of Words project. This community-drive project uses human word association data to map meaning in the mental lexicon across most of the worlds' languages.
Jenny Chen Lu is a scholar in psychology, public policy, and disability studies. She is an incoming Assistant Professor, jointly appointed between Disability Studies and Institute for Society & Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), starting in summer 2026. Dr. Lu received her B.A. from Wellesley College and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago, and her dissertation on deixis in language development was awarded the Saller Dissertation Prize at UChicago. Among other things, Jenny is interested in how iconicity affects the form of gesture and sign within signed and spoken languages.
Rachel Skwersky graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) with a degree in Cognitive Science and a minor in Data Science. She is currently working as a Project manager in the KIDD LAB in UCB. Rachel is fascinated by language acquisition from a humanistic and computational perspective, and specifically on how sign language phonology and semantics influence vocabulary development.
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