Alexis Wellwood

Alexis Wellwood is a Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California (USC), holding courtesy appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology. Since 2022, they serve as Deputy Director of Philosophy and since 2023 as a Leadership Fellow to the USC Dornsife Divisional Dean of Humanities. Their research focuses on semantics, language acquisition, and event cognition, leading the Meaning Lab since 2017 and directing the North American Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information in 2022. They received the 2019 Albert S. Raubenheimer award for Outstanding Junior Faculty and hold an NSF grant in cognitive sciences.

Education: PhD in Linguistics (2014) from the University of Maryland, advised by Valentine Hacquard. Mentored by Paul Pietroski, Alexander Williams, Jeffrey Lidz, and Colin Phillips. Supported by SSHRC and the Maryland Language Science Center.

Research interests include semantics, syntax-semantics interfaces, event perception, and comparative structures. They investigate how linguistic meanings interact with cognitive processes, particularly in children's language development, through experimental and formal methods. Key contributions include work on gradable adjectives, event ontology, and superlative acquisition.

Leadership roles: Steering committee member of USC's Cognitive Science Program, co-director of Mind and Language in LA (since 2018), and Associate Editor for Journal of Semantics (2021–present). They established the Meaning Lab and previously led the Child Language Development Laboratory at Northwestern University (2012–2017).

Awards and grants: NSF Brain and Cognitive Sciences grant (2017), Raubenheimer award (2019), and multiple collaborative projects across linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Their work bridges formal semantics with empirical studies of language use and cognitive mechanisms.