Lalitha Balachandran

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Welcome! I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department at UC Santa Cruz, working on field-based teaching & learning in ecology with the "FUTURE" (Field-based Undergraduate Training: Utilizing Research for Equity) in Biology team (NSF #2329523), led by PIs Roxanne Beltran, Robin Dunkin, and Erika Zavaleta.

My postdoctoral work focuses on how students learn and change as a result of participating in field-based educational experiences. It ties together two other threads of work I've been involved with: work on pedagogy (on course design, mentored research opportunities in STEM, and online learning outcomes), and in linguistics/cognitive science (on the relationship between memory and language, and topics in formal linguistics).

In September of 2024, I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics, advised by Matt Wagers, from the UC Santa Cruz Linguistics Department. My dissertation work was on how readers incrementally partition higher-order linguistic units in memory, using a temporal context mechanism during encoding, which facilitates more targeted memory retrieval operations during language comprehension in certain structural contexts; you can read it here. Linguistics & cognitive science remain active areas of research that I'm involved in, but in shifting from linguistics to biology education research, a common thread that ties my work together is understanding cognitive mechanisms that drive learning & comprehension.