Welcome to our incoming Ph.D. students!

We are excited to introduce our incoming Ph.D. cohort, who will be joining the department in the fall of 2025! Please give them all a warm welcome—we're so glad you're joining us!

Below are the students' self-provided introductions:

Seo-young Lee

I grew up in Seoul, and received my BA in English, BS in Statistics, and MA in English Linguistics from Seoul National University. My research interests include formal semantics, formal pragmatics, and the semantics-pragmatics interface, and I have worked on topics such as anti-scalar implicature in deontic modals and the bias in NAmE high negated questions. At Stanford, I hope both for opportunities to develop the research I have done so far, and for opportunities to learn something completely new!

Michael Senko

I completed a B.S./M.A. in Linguistics at Northwestern University in 2022, where I engaged in research projects investigating gendered reference on Twitter as well as place ideology in Chicago. Since then, I have worked for three years as a teacher of computer science, religion, English, and math -- oh my! -- in both New York City and Taiwan. At Stanford, I hope to continue exploring intersections of sociolinguistics, phonetics, and computational methods, particularly in the cognitive representation and maintenance of linguistic stereotypes. I'm thrilled to be joining the Stanford Linguistics community and can't wait to get started!

Lorena Martín

I received an MA in Computational Linguistics from the University of Tübingen and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Carleton University. During my studies, I focused on the creation of language technologies for under-resourced languages using collaborative research approaches. I am interested in how recent advances in language technology can support multilingualism and the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages. Before joining Stanford, I spent the past year as a trainee at the European Parliament, where I learnt about AI governance and ethics. During my PhD, I would like to combine these interests and learn more about NLP, sociolinguistics, and sustainable methodologies in NLP research.

Amir Zur

I completed my BA in Linguistics and MS in Computer Science at Stanford University. There, I explored abstractions in artificial neural networks: what is the connection between the low-level activity of neurons and high-level concepts such as sentence structure or lexical semantics? I’m excited to continue studying natural language processing, semantics, and psycholinguistics during my PhD. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy soccer, hiking, biking, and generally spending time outdoors. I’m looking forward to returning to the Stanford community!