Lera Boroditsky - Biography

Lera Boroditsky (born about 1976 in Belarus) is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. Professor Boroditsky does research in cognitive science with a specific focus on cognitive linguistics. She studies language and cognition, specifically focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception. She received her B.A. from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University, where her thesis advisor was Gordon Bower.

Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. She has received several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER award, the Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and being named a Searle Scholar.

Her work has provided new insights on the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (see Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). She has discovered important empirical examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. This work has been influential in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in countering the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture. For her work, she was named an Utne Reader visionary in 2011.

In addition to scholarly work, Boroditsky also gives popular science lectures to the general public, and her work has been covered in news and media outlets. She also has taught the "Introduction to Cognition and the Brain" class at Stanford since Spring 2006. For the Burning Man festival, she once built a banana vehicle.

Publications

• Boroditsky, L. & Ramscar, M. (2002). The roles of body and mind in abstract thought. Psychological Science, 13(2), 185–188.
• Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought? English and Mandarin speakers' conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1–22.
• Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75(1), 1–28.

External links

• Boroditsky's website
• Profile in the Boston Globe
• NPR interview (MP3)
• Story in the Economist
• Searle Scholars Profile
• Profile in San Francisco Guardian
• The Language of Responsibility Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Brief magazine article – Scientific American Mind