Dora Alexopoulou

Dr Dora Alexopoulou is an Associate Professor in First and Second Language Acquisition and Language Typology at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. She leads the EF Lab for Applied Language Learning and serves as an Alan Turing Fellow (2021-2023), while also contributing to interdisciplinary initiatives like the Humanities and Data Science Special Interest Group.

• Education: BA in Greek Philology (University of Athens), MSc in Natural Language and Speech Processing (University of Edinburgh), PhD in Linguistics
• Current Affiliations: Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, Cambridge Bilingualism Network co-founder

Her research focuses on syntax as a cognitive capacity and its role in language learning, particularly crosslinguistic influence in L2 acquisition. She combines generative syntax theory with experimental and corpus methodologies, including big data from online platforms, to study topics like article acquisition, semantic processing, and linguistic complexity in L2 development.

Recent projects include collaborations with EF Education First and Cambridge Language Sciences, examining typological similarity effects on L2 proficiency and developing data-driven learning tools. Her publications address computational approaches to SLA, syntactic learnability, and applications of machine learning in learner corpus analysis.

• Scientific Awards: Albert Valdman Award for Outstanding Publication in SSLA (2016)

She supervises PhD students in syntactic theory and applied linguistics, with past advisees including Kateryna Derkach and Itamar Shatz. Her lab utilizes NLP techniques for analyzing learner data, focusing on morphosyntactic complexity and input processing instruction.