The Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies is pleased to announce that Dr. Svetlana Vetchinnikova has been appointed as the Deputy Director of HCAS. Her five-year term begins in September 2024. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Vetchinnikova worked as a Core Fellow at HCAS (2021–2023), and served, for example, as a staff representative in the HCAS Board. In the academic year 2023–24, she acted as the interim Deputy Director of HCAS.
Dr. Vetchinnikova holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of Helsinki (2014). She did her postdoctoral work in research projects on variation and change in English and on chunking in speech processing. Before joining the Collegium, she also worked as a university lecturer in English Linguistics at the Department of Languages. Her Collegium project has looked into individual variation in how humans produce and comprehend language. In addition to having published a number of journal articles, she is the co-editor of Changing English (2017, De Gruyter) and Language Change: The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca (2020, CUP), and the author of Phraseology and the Advanced Language Learner (2019, CUP).
In her new research project, Dr. Vetchinnikova plans to approach disciplinary communities as complex adaptive systems in order to study their emergence and evolution using a variety of different methods developed in linguistics. The ultimate goal of the project is to shed new light on the role of social, linguistic, and cognitive processes in the development of scientific theories. According to her, the idea for the project organically grew from day-to-day cross-disciplinary interactions at the Collegium and can now continue to take shape in this fertile environment.
“I see my five-year term at the Collegium as a wonderful opportunity to work closely with issues of science policy, interdisciplinarity, and the role of the social sciences and humanities in academia, both as an administrator and as a researcher”.