Director
Office of Postdoctoral Affairs
Dr. Paola Cepeda is the Director of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a national leader and expert on postdoctoral affairs and professional development for early-career scientists. Dr. Cepeda has a strong record of developing and managing successful learning, training and advising programs for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from different fields (from STEM and Medicine to the Arts, the Humanities and the Social Sciences). Dr. Cepeda serves as the Chair of the Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics of the Linguistic Society of America, the International Officer of the National Postdoctoral Association International Taskforce, and a Member at Large of the Postdoctoral Leaders Section Steering Committee of the Group on Research, Education and Training (GREAT) of the Association of American Medical Colleges. In these capacities, Dr. Cepeda advocates and works for interventions and policies to retain and engage underrepresented identities in academia (in particular, women, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ scholars) and to educate international trainees about their academic and career mobility options in the United States. Dr. Cepeda co-founded the Pop-Up Mentoring Program, a hallmark of the Linguistic Society of America, for which she was awarded the Linguistic Service Award in 2019. Dr. Cepeda holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stony Brook University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Andean Studies from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
P. Cépeda & N. Chernets (2022). Setting up international Ph.D.s and postdocs for success. Inside Higher Ed, October 17. [opinion piece]
P. Cépeda, H. Kotek, K. Pabst, & K. Syrett (2021). Gender bias in linguistics textbooks. Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice 1997? Language 97(4). DOI:10.1353/lan.0.0256
P. Cépeda & S. Cyrino (2020). Putting objects in order: Asymmetrical relations in Spanish and Portuguese ditransitives. In Dative constructions in Romance and beyond, ed. by A. Pineda & J. Mateu, 97-116. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3776539
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