Guiseppe Ricciardi defended his dissertation On the Linguistic Encoding of the Notion of Inference, which takes on the problem of epistemic modals from a new experimental and theoretical angle and makes the case for their encoding as evidentials (his committee was Kate Davidson, Ted Gibson, Susi Wurmbrand, and Manfred Krikfa). We're thrilled to hear that Giuseppe is taking up a position with Frontiers publishing upon graduation - huge congratulations, Giuseppe!!

Shannon Bryant defended her dissertation Lost in space: Pronoun choice in English locative prepositional phrases, which takes up one of the thorniest puzzles adjacent to Binding Theory, the distribution of reflexives and personal pronouns in locative prepositional phrases, through a theoretical syntactic and experimental semantic lens (her committee was Isabelle Charnavel, Kate Davidson, and Jesse Snedeker). Shannon is headed to Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science as a postdoc (check out her website here)- we're so excited for her future colleagues and students there. Huge congratulations, Shannon!! 

Kate Davidson and Yuhan Zhang recently returned from Chicago to present at the 58th annual conference of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Yuhan presented her work with Kate on "Competing de dicto terms reduce de re acceptability" (pictured) and Kate presented an invited talk on "Semiotic distinctions in compositional semantics".