Bio
Daphna Heller obtained her undergraduate degree in Linguistics and Arabic Language and Literature (magna cum laude) from Tel Aviv University in 1996.
She continued to obtain a Master in Linguistics (summa cum laude) from the same institution in 1999.
She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Rutgers in 2005, where she was trained as a theoretical linguist with a focus on formal semantics.
In 2004-2008, Heller was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, where she was trained in psycholinguistics in the lab of renowned psycholinguist Michael K. Tanenhaus.
She continued her training in psycholinguistics under the supervision of Craig Chambers at the University of Toronto (Mississauga).
In 2009, she joined the faculty in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, where she is currently an Associate Professor.
Daphna Heller's research program examines issues in semantics and pragmatics from the perspective of cognitive science; specifically, how language is produced and interpreted in real time, within the rich context of a conversation. At U of T, she directs the Toronto Language Processing Lab (TLPL), which houses a state-of-the-art eye-tracking system.
She has collaborated widely, with linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, and her work has been published in venues across a broad range of fields, including Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Semantics, Cognition and Cognitive Science.