Ellen Lau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, and serves as Co-Director of the KIT-Maryland MEG Lab. Her research is aimed at linking what we know about language to what we know about the brain, with the goal of developing better models of language processing and the neural mechanisms underlying it. Dr. Lau’s work makes use of a wide range of behavioral and neurophysiological techniques towards this end, including ERPs, MEG, and fMRI. Primary research emphases are in lexical-conceptual access and semantic/syntactic/discourse structure building, and a significant portion of this work examines these questions through the lens of prediction, by asking how readers and listeners use their knowledge of the language to build expectations about the upcoming input. She is also interested in the challenges faced by populations such as second language learners and patients with neurocognitive disorders in generating such expectations.