Meredith Brown, Ph.D. (2014-2018)

Meredith is interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie rapid, probabilistic, and flexible effects of linguistic context on the dynamics of spoken language understanding. Her doctoral research at the University of Rochester used eye-tracking and other behavioral methods to investigate how sentence prosody (the pitch and rhythm of speech) and other contextual factors influence listeners' inferences about speakers' intentions and their expectations about how upcoming speech will be realized in context. In her time in the NeuroCogniton Lab at Mass. General and Tufts, from 2014-2018, Meredith used neurophysiological techniques to probe the mechanisms supporting contextual modulation of speech perception and examine how these mechanisms break down in neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia). Meredith is now working as a data scientist on the Data Strategy & Solutions team at Vertex Pharmaceuticals.