Change in the Scientific Advisory Board of the IWM

After Prof. Dr. Vincent Aleven stepped down from the Scientific Advisory Board at the end of 2025 following two terms of office, Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg is now joining the seven-member advisory board. The Saarbrücken-based computational linguist conducts research on Cognitive Models of Human Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation and is particularly renowned in the fields of Experimental Psycholinguistics and Experimental and Computational Discourse and Pragmatics.

‘Vera Demberg's research topics are closely related to those of the IWM, and we are delighted to have found in her an expert in research at the interface between humans and machines, among other things. At the same time, we are saying goodbye to Vincent Aleven, another valued colleague who has been with us for many years and to whom we are very grateful for his commitment to the IWM,’ says Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress, Exexcutive Director of the IWM about the change.

Vera Demberg earned her doctorate in Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and has been a professor of Computer Science and Computational Linguistics at Saarland University since 2016. She has gained an excellent reputation with groundbreaking work on language processing and the modelling of cognitive processes and has received numerous awards for her research. Since 2024, she has been elected as member of the ‘Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz’ and a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.