Established through a foundation built by Catherine C. & Bruce A. Bastian, this endowed position is designed to recognize excellence and prominence in research, teaching and service within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Kara Federmeier is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Illinois, and a full time faculty member at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where she leads the Illinois Language and Literacy Initiative.
Kara's research examines the neurobiological basis of such meaning, asking how world knowledge derived from multiple modalities comes to be organized in the brain and how such information is integrated and made available for use in varied contexts and often in only hundreds of milliseconds. Her research group uses human electrophysiological techniques in combination with behavioral, eye movement, and other brain imaging methods to examine how semantic information is structured as a function of modality and stimulus type, how it is brought to bear during language comprehension by younger and older adults, and how it is differentially accessed and used by the two hemispheres of the brain.