In her role as Provost Faculty Fellow, Tessa will collaborate closely with the Graduate Studies team in the Office of the Provost. Her work will focus on advancing shared understanding and effective practices related to graduate education and mentorship, as well as further strengthening productive, respectful working relationships across the University.
Tessa is a professor in the Department of Psychology and holds affiliated faculty appointments in the Departments of Linguistics and Communication Science and Disorders. She is also a senior scientist at the Learning Research & Development Center. Tessa earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has established a strong record of interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and service across her academic roles.
Tessa’s research focuses on how people understand language, drawing on insights from formal linguistics and cognitive psychology to examine how readers and listeners construct meaning from language in context. Her work has contributed significantly to our understanding of language processing and reflects a deep commitment to collaborative, cross-disciplinary inquiry.