About me
I am an applied linguist.
Using corpus linguistics methods to solve real world problems is one of my academic missions.
I am a Senior Researcher (CS II / Associate Professor level) at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the West University of Timisoara, Romania. As the Founder and President of the Research Centre CODHUS, my role is to coordinate corpus related interdisciplinary projects with educational impact. CODHUS is the first research centre in Romania that uses Corpus Linguistics for Applied Research. We are specialised in Linguistics for Education.
My research aims at finding answers to questions such as:
- How can we support education through linguistic research? (e.g. textbook analysis and curriculum recommendations)
- How can we conduct relevant research at the intersection of education and language related digital tool development for the benefit of students and teachers?
- How do reading and writing tasks in school (textbook content and student production) correlate with PISA exam requests and results in Romania?
- How do writing tasks in school support critical thinking skills?
- How do reading and writing tasks influence multidimensional competence building in school and at the university?
- What is the connection between literacy, linguistic research, and academic success at all levels (school, university and beyond)?
- How does the linguistic complexity of school textbooks influence learning and academic success?
- Can we build digital and AI supported tools to improve reading and writing for school and university students? How can we use them?
- Why do school and university students have difficulties in writing their papers / reading certain types of texts?
- What is the readability formula for Romanian language? How can we adapt it for children’s literature texts?
- Which are the linguistic challenges when writing / reading in L1 versus L2?
- How can teachers help students write better / read more?
To answer such questions, I conduct research projects in which we collect large collections of authentic language samples. We do this, in most cases, for the first time. See, for example, ROGER, DACRE and LEMI.
Prior to working at WUT, I worked as a Junior and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich and at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), in Switzerland, for more than eight years. My PhD was conducted at Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Christian Mair. I also conducted research stages at several other European universities: University of Oxford, Jesus College (UK), University of Siena (Italy) and Coventry University (UK). In 2017, I received the prestigious PROMYS grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (similar to ERC Starting Grants) to start the ROGER project in Romania.
The places where I worked as a researcher are listed in this Academic Biography Infographic:
I am an applied linguist.
Using corpus linguistics methods to solve real world problems is one of my academic missions.
My research aims at finding answers to questions such as:
- How can we support education through linguistic research? (e.g. textbook analysis and curriculum recommendations)
- How can we conduct relevant research at the intersection of education and language related digital tool development for the benefit of students and teachers?
- How do reading and writing tasks in school (textbook content and student production) correlate with PISA exam requests and results in Romania?
- How do writing tasks in school support critical thinking skills?
- How do reading and writing tasks influence multidimensional competence building in school and at the university?
- What is the connection between literacy, linguistic research, and academic success at all levels (school, university and beyond)?
- How does the linguistic complexity of school textbooks influence learning and academic success?
- Can we build digital and AI supported tools to improve reading and writing for school and university students? How can we use them?
- Why do school and university students have difficulties in writing their papers / reading certain types of texts?
- What is the readability formula for Romanian language? How can we adapt it for children’s literature texts?
- Which are the linguistic challenges when writing / reading in L1 versus L2?
- How can teachers help students write better / read more?
To answer such questions, I conduct research projects in which we collect large collections of authentic language samples. We do this, in most cases, for the first time, since such data capture the Romanian context.
I am a Senior Researcher (CS II / Associate Professor level) at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the West University of Timisoara, Romania.
As the Founder and President of the Research Centre CODHUS, my role is to coordinate corpus related interdisciplinary projects with educational impact.
See, for example, ROGER, DACRE and LEMI.
CODHUS is the first Digital Humanities centre in Romania that uses Corpus Linguistics for Applied Research.
Prior to working at WUT, I worked as a Junior and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich and at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), in Switzerland, for more than eight years.
My PhD was conducted at Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Christian Mair.
I also conducted research stages at several other European universities: University of Oxford, Jesus College (UK), University of Siena (Italy) and Coventry University (UK).
In 2017, I received the prestigious PROMYS grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (similar to ERC Starting Grants) to start the ROGER project in Romania.
The places where I worked as a researcher are listed in this Academic Biography Infographic:
More about my academic career in my long CV in English or my short CV in Romanian.
My special interest is in creating tools and apps by which our research data and results can be used for research, teaching and general use in open access user-friendly format. That is why almost all our projects result in educational tools such as: ROGER platform, EXPRES platform, ComparaQ or LEMI.
Since 2020, I also supervise PhD students.
Research interests
Applied Corpus Linguistics, Education and Linguistic Digital Tools, Academic Writing, Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies, Literacy Policy and Strategy Making
Contact information here.
My academic profiles: Google Scholar, BRAINMAP (ID: U-1700-041N-9340), ORCID, ResearchGate