Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey Elman, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, earned his A.B. cum laude from Harvard College in 1969 and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. He joined UCSD in 1977 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, advancing to Associate Professor and then Professor. In 1989, he transitioned to the Department of Cognitive Science as Professor, becoming Distinguished Professor in 2006 and holder of the Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair. A founding member of the Cognitive Science department—the first of its kind worldwide—he served as its Chair from 1995 to 1998. Elman held key leadership roles, including founding Director of the Center for Research in Language (1985-1994, 2003-2004), founding co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind (2004-2012), founding co-Director of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, Associate Dean (2002-2006) and Dean (2006-2014) of the Division of Social Sciences, and Director of Online and Technology Enhanced Education (2015-2017).

Elman’s research centered on language processing, psycholinguistics, event representation, discourse coherence, and connectionist models of cognitive development. He co-developed the TRACE model of speech perception and introduced the Simple Recurrent Network (Elman net) in his seminal 1990 paper “Finding Structure in Time” (Cognitive Science), with over 19,000 citations. Key publications include “Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of starting small” (Cognition, 1993), “Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks, and grammatical structure” (Machine Learning, 1991), the co-authored book “Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development” (MIT Press, 1996), and “The TRACE model of speech perception” (Cognitive Psychology, 1986). His contributions have shaped psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. Honors include the David E. Rumelhart Prize (2007), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016), Inaugural Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society (2002), Doctor Honoris Causa from New Bulgarian University (2002), and Fellow of the American Psychological Society (2015). He served as Senior Editor of the Journal of the Cognitive Science Society (1992-1995) and on editorial boards for Neural Computation, Neural Networks, and others.

Professional Email: elman@cogsci.ucsd.edu