News

I am the organising chair of a new and exciting reading group at Queen's whose focus is current trends in the study of cognition.  We have a smart, fun, and eclectic group of attendees.  Anyone interested in joining or hearing more about this group should send me a note.

I'm presenting at COGS2009 this summer in beautiful Amsterdam.  Drop me a line if you plan to attend.

Background

I received my PhD in the Philosophy of Mind (with a focus on language and logic) from Dalhousie University. Wanting to gain some hands-on cog-sci experience, I took up the post of ontological engineer/computational linguist at Cycorp, an AI think-tank in Austin, Texas that has produced Cyc, the brain-child of Doug Lenat and currently the largest common sense knowledge base + inference engine in the world.

Eventually, family and the birth of a child drew me back to Canada, specifically to Kingston – how we ended up here is a long story, but a happy one since this is a gem of a city – and I now teach and research at Queen’s University.

I’ve got lots of different strands of thought underway (see Research for more), but all are in the burgeoning field of Embodied Cognition. Related to that, I am in the process of creating an institute for embodied cognition, the only one of its kind in Canada as far as I know (please send me an e-mail if I’m wrong about that), so that people doing research in this field can come together to share ideas and inspire one another.

Other

Since moving to the Kingston area, I have been an active participant in the Kingston Green Party, having served as campaign manager for numerous elections, both provincial and federal, and just generally helping out whenever hands are needed. To find out more about the Kingston Greens, one of the best organised and developed EDA's in the country, look here.

If you are interested in staying current on local (Kingston and area) environmental issues and events, you can subscribe to Kingston Green Light; it's a wonderfully informative newsletter that my husband, Morgan Wade, pulls together bi-weekly.