Presenter:

Dr. Bozena Pajak
Head of Learning Science, Duolingo

Café Sci: The Science of Language Learning

How is it that adults struggle to learn a language, while children do so effortlessly? On Mon., May 6, join Dr. Bozena Pajak, Head of Learning Science at Duolingo, as she talks about the complexities of language, how humans manage to learn it, and how to optimize teaching for adults. 

Pajak is the Head of Learning Science at Duolingo, a language learning company with more than 300 million users worldwide. She leads a team of learning scientists and language experts responsible for improving how Duolingo teaches. Pajak graduated from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and received her PhD in Linguistics from University of California, San Diego in 2012. 

Before joining Duolingo in 2015, she completed a postdoctoral at University of Rochester, and then worked as a researcher and lecturer at Northwestern University in Chicago. In her research, she's been mainly interested in how people's prior language knowledge affects the way they learn additional languages, and what kinds of pedagogical techniques lead to most effective learning.