Maria Montefinese, Assistant Professor at the University of Padova (UNIPD) and Head of the Executive and Semantic Control lab at IRCCS San Camillo Hospital (Venice), is an experimental psychologist fascinated by word meaning’s cerebral organization and retrieval in healthy participants and patients with language disorders across languages.
With a Ph.D. from the University of Chieti in 2014, she trained at institutions like University College London (UCL), University of York and UNIPD under mentors David Vinson, Gabriella Vigliocco, Beth Jefferies and Carlo Semenza.
Recognized for her methodologically rigorous research, she has earned her recognition as a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society and an honorary research fellow at UCL. She secured funding from organizations like the Experimental Psychology Society (2013), European Commission (European MSCA in 2016), Italian Ministry of Health (2019) and European Union (2022).
Maria is now embarking on a Global MSCA project CTRL-ALT-DEV, awarded the Seal of Excellence in 2023, focusing on word meaning retrieval during children’s cognitive development across languages. Through this project she will collaborate with Erin Buchanan at Harrisburg University and Silvia Benavides-Varela at UNIPD’s Department of Developmental and Social Psychology.