Dr. Ev Fedorenko
Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Postdoctoral fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Ev Fedorenko grew up in a time of transition in Russia, at the end of the Soviet Union. Despite financial challenges and the rapid political changes in the region, her parents worked diligently to provide a stable environment in which Ev could prioritize her education. In this environment, Ev found a passion for languages. While she studied, her mother mandated that everyone else in the house walk on tiptoes to preserve Ev’s focus. This love for languages has persisted ever since; Ev is now an associate professor of neuroscience in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, where she studies the neuroscience of language.
As Ev began considering what she wanted to do after high school, she dreamt of furthering her education abroad. That dream came true; she was offered full financial aid at several US colleges and chose to attend Harvard. Her time in Cambridge was busy; in addition to her studies, Ev juggled three jobs to support her family back in Russia. She still harbored a love for languages, but Ev was also interested in the methodology of science and the empirical rigor of the scientific method. She found the ideal mixture in a neuropsychology of language class and decided she wanted to pursue a PhD studying the psychology of language.
After working for a few years with Dr. Ted Gibson, Ev ended up in the lab of Dr. Nancy Kanwisher, who was interested in studying whether any regions of the brain may be selective for language. This field of neurobiology of language was full of contradictions and debates, so Ev was hesitant at first. However, when Nancy and Ev ran an experiment looking for music processing regions in the brain and presented language stimuli as a control condition, they saw very strong activation in the language condition. This convinced Ev to start characterizing language-responsive regions in the brain, which she worked on during both her PhD and post-doc in Nancy’s lab.
Within this broader field, Ev focused on whether language shared neural machinery with other cognitive functions. Using fMRI, Ev showed that the regions of the brain that activate in response to language are not engaged during other cognitive tasks, suggesting that language processing brain regions are highly specialized.
Ev’s mentors treated her like an independent scientist from early on and encouraged her in her pursuit of starting her own lab. However, Ev struggled to get interviews and offers for a faculty position for a few years. She conjectures that this may have been related to having a partner who is a full professor at MIT, which typically makes it challenging to move. However, Ev was not dissuaded from her ambitions; she was too passionate about her work to give up. She eventually secured a position at Massachusetts General Hospital and then moved her lab to MIT a few years later. Ev credits her mentors for helping her make a smooth transition to a faculty position. She also attributes her early success in part to the first few people she hired, who were immensely helpful in setting up a strong foundation for the lab.
As a PI, Ev strives to understand how the language system (which extracts meaning from linguistic input) works with systems of reasoning, which perform further operations on that input. For example, Ev is interested in the way the brain turns a verbal math problem into a format that mathematical processing circuits can work with. Ev also studies whether language is represented and processed differently in those with different linguistic histories or abilities. Ev and her lab have surprisingly found that polyglots (people who speak many languages) have weaker and more focal responses to their native language compared to monolingual and bilingual speakers, suggesting that perhaps they are processing language more efficiently.
Ev and her lab are also interested in how language areas develop in the brain. At around six months of age, babies begin to form correspondences between linguistic forms (words and phrases) and meanings and by age 3.5 years children are quite proficient language users, but there is a dearth of research on how the language system emerges in the developing brain. With the help of Sesame Street, one of the most effective means of getting a toddler to stay still, a postdoc in the lab is taking fMRI images in 2- and 3-year-olds. They hope to learn how language regions emerge and change during this early developmental period, and what these regions do before a child has acquired linguistic abilities. Finally, Ev is interested in studying language in more naturalistic communicative settings, to understand how linguistic information is combined with non-linguistic social cues, such as facial expressions and intonation.
Ev expresses gratitude for her mentors, her family, and the members of her lab. She describes her focus in her lab as having shifted, from making scientific discoveries to mentoring and supporting the careers of young scientists, which she finds incredibly rewarding. Her mentoring philosophy is built on mutual respect, kindness and an awareness of each individual’s unique challenges and strengths. Science is clearly Ev’s true passion; she also describes it as her main hobby. Surely Ev's passion will inspire her mentees to chase their own ambitions, whether science becomes their job, their hobby, or both!
Find out more about Ev and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Meenakshi’s full interview with Ev on May 13, 2024 below!
