Caroline Rowland - Biography#

Caroline Rowland is a developmental scientist who has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of human development, specifically how and why humans are the only species in the world capable of learning language. She was, until 2019, co-Director of the ESRC LuCiD Centre, the largest Centre grant then awarded by the UK ESRC. In 2016 she founded the Language Development Department at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, NL), supported by permanent research funding awarded to her by the Max Planck Society. Her team has made significant discoveries into the nature and function of the brain’s learning and processing mechanisms, the ontogenesis of language, and how the multimodal environment supports learning across cultures/languages.

On societal impact, Rowland and colleagues have built the Nijmegen-based Baby & Child Research Centre into a go-to knowledge-platform for Dutch parents, families, children, students and practitioners in education and healthcare. Their “cradle to grave” agenda promotes research on child development via festivals, masterclasses, talks, newsletters, a website, and social media. Rowland also co-founded (with Sharon Unsworth and Paula Fikkert at Radboud University) the award-winning Kletskoppen Kindertaal Festival, working with community groups to run a large biannual festival (6000+ visitors), roadshows, and school-based events that promote linguistics to 0-12-year-olds and their families. In education, Rowland is committed to developing initiatives to educate and inspire students and early career researchers (ECRs), particularly those from non-traditional backgrounds. In 2019, together with colleagues from Stanford University, Chicago University and ENS Paris, she co-founded the LangVIEW community, a platform for a global network of students, clinicians and researchers to discuss their ideas with each other, and with established scholars. In 2023, she helped create the Truly Global International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (L+); a free, online 5-day school designed to train and empower ERCs from the global South, now in its third iteration. In 2024, she led the Talent+ initiative at the Max Planck Institute, a multi-faceted training and internship scheme for students from under-represented groups, designed to make them competitive for funded PhD programs in cognitive science.