Joan Sereno Named to Lead NSF’s Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences Division

Last month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the appointment of Joan Sereno as the next Division Director for the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) within the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Sereno, a psycholinguist who will be coming to NSF as a rotator, is co-director of the Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Laboratory at the University of Kansas and chair of KU’s linguistics department. As BCS lead, Sereno will oversee the division’s research programs in cognitive science, anthropology, geography, psychology, and linguistics, among others. She will start in her NSF post on August 29, succeeding Marc Sebrechts who led BCS since 2018.