Bio
My name is Pauline Maes and I am a psycholinguist by training. Born and raised in Brussels (Belgium), I am currently based in Boston (MA) where I am completing a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University's Center for Autism Research Excellence under the supervision of Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg. I am leading a research project, funded by a MSCA postdoctoral grant from the European Research Executive Agency, investigating repetitive speech use during social interactions in autistic preschoolers.
Before making the big move across the pond, I earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Université libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium) where I worked at the Autism in Context: Theory and Experiment lab under the supervision of Dr. Mikhail Kissine. My dissertation sought to investigate visual social attention and profiles of expressive language, as well as their interrelationship, in autistic preschoolers, including many who had very limited spoken language. After defending my dissertation, I completed a 1-year postdoctoral fellowship for the national and multi-centric Belgian Language in Autism Study, dealing mostly with coordination and team management, IRB, and the conceptualization of our mobile lab!