
As a young girl growing up in the former Soviet Union, Evelina Fedorenko PhD ’07 studied several languages, including English, as her mother hoped that it would give her the chance to eventually move abroad for better opportunities.Her language studies not only helped her establish a new life in the United States as an adult, but also led to a lifelong interest in linguistics and how the brain processes language. Now an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, Fedorenko studies the brain’s language-processing regions: how they arise,…