Tamara Y. Swaab, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist and a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. Her research program aims to understand the cognitive and neural architectures of language comprehension in normal and language impaired populations.
Dr. Swaab’s lab uses multiple methods, including EEG, ERPs, fMRI and eyetracking, to study both the temporal and spatial dimensions of language and cognition in the brain. Her research program is funded by grants from NSF and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Together with her students, postdocs and collaborators she has published her research in in a wide range of prominent journals in the field.
Dr. Swaab was trained with Drs. Peter Hagoort, Colin Brown and Pim Levelt at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and earned her PhD degree in Cognitive Neuroscience in 1996 from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She then came to the Center for Neuroscience at UC Davis and completed her McDonnell-Pew postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Robert Knight in 1998.
At UC Davis, she is a member of the language sciences faculty, and collaborates on projects that include studies of sentence processing, discourse processing, individual differences in language comprehension, the interface between language and memory and language deficits in schizophrenia with, among others, Drs. Megan Boudewyn, Cameron Carter, Debra Long, Matthew Traxler and Andy Yonelinas.