Carmen Pietropaolo

COMMUNICATION AND KTT OFFICER

Carmen (Carmela) Pietropaolo earned her Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics and Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Freiburg with a grant from the German Research Foundation and was a fellow at the graduate school 1624 “Frequency effects in language”. Her research focused on computational models of language learning and rule formation. She completed her post-doc at the University of Düsseldorf, where she became scientific coordinator for a cross-functional project on the structure and representation of thought in language funded by the German Research Foundation (SFB 991). She organized international conferences, workshops, seminars and training courses, led the development of experiment platforms and data analysis tools, and coached PhD students in statistical analysis and visual presentation of behavioral data.

She has extensive experience coordinating interdisciplinary teams in cognitive science, (neuro-)linguistics, psychology, and computer science, writing research proposals, and managing successful applications for public funding. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses in empirical linguistics, statistics for linguists, and language acquisition, among other topics.

Passionate about knowledge and technology transfer, she collaborated with the Gründerbüro and Foundersclub e.V. at the University of Freiburg to organize projects connecting academia and industry, accelerating technological innovation and the translation of research into market-ready applications (KTUR EUCOR, Exist Grant, SPARK, among others).

Currently, she works at NCCR SPIN at the University of Basel, coordinating Young Researchers’ Education Programs and the Knowledge and Technology Transfer Program. In this role, she designs and implements initiatives, monitors compliance with ethical and funding standards, advises early-career researchers, and facilitates collaborations across over 36 research groups.