Academic name: T. R. Williamson (papers, presentations, etc.)
Informal name: Tom (online, irl)
Pronouns: he/him/his
Occupation: Linguist (in various ways)
Me: On the left (Liam McKnight on the right)
Current roles:
PhD student and Associate Lecturer in the Brain, Language, and Behaviour lab in the Bristol Centre for Linguistics at University of the West of England and Southmead Hospital
Recognitions Consultant, UK & Ireland for Skills for English (at PSI)
Research Assistant, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford
Research Assistant, Centre for the Neuroscience of Embodied Cognition, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California
Chair of the Advisory Board, Journal of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain. JoULAB is the sole undergrad-only linguistics journal in the world.
Member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain Student Committee, an organisation aiming to support postgraduate linguistics students in the UK.
Writer mainly of essays on Medium and also poetry. I touch on philosophy, politics, linguistics, my experience with autism, and anything else I feel strongly about.
Current projects:
Intraoperative language testing for awake craniotomies
I design language tests for awake craniotomies for brain cancer patients that probe intersections between motor and linguistic systems.
University acceptances of PSI English tests
I am responsible for engagement with and producing insights on UK and Irish universities on behalf of the English proficiency test provider.
The effects of syntactic operations on cognition
With colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge, we study the role of the syntactic operations of certain languages on the cognitive abilities of those languages' speakers.
Colour metaphor processing in colourblind people
With colleagues at USC, UC Berkeley, and Google, we investigate the embodiment of colour semantics processing.
Research commercialisation
I research and write about commercialising research in the context of higher education policy and reform.