Graduate Receives Prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Award

Tali Ditman has received the 2007-2008 Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS) Doctoral Dissertation Award. Ditman, who earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Tufts in 2007, was honored for her dissertation titled, “Neural Indices of Discourse Comprehension”, which explored how readers are able to integrate information across sentence boundaries.

“During reading, we often encounter multiple references to the same character (e.g., understanding that "he" refers to a specific male character that had been mentioned previously),” writes Ditman, via e-mail, when asked about her dissertation. “I examined the cues we use to help us link these references.”

Tali Ditman

Ditman is the first Tufts Arts and Sciences graduate to receive this award, which is bestowed annually to a Ph.D. student who has completed his or her doctoral work within the previous five years. Doctoral students eligible for the award come from 120 graduate schools in the United States and Canada, including research universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins.

“Dr. Tali Ditman was one of the best all around graduate students our program has ever graduated,” says Phil Holcomb, Tufts psychology professor and Ditman’s former advisor. “In my 20 years at Tufts, with more than 10 Ph.D. students, Dr. Ditman is a clear standout. She has it all, intelligence, motivation and creativity. She is also a great teacher and mentor having worked with a lot of undergrads during her time in my lab.”

When asked about receiving the award, Ditman writes,

“I was incredibly honored just to be nominated for this award and never expected to be chosen as the recipient. This award reflects the amazing education and mentorship that I have received at Tufts University.”

Ditman’s award comes with a $1,000 stipend and an all-expenses paid trip to New York for the NAGS annual meeting on April 11th, 2008.

Tali Ditman is a current post-doctoral research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is continuing to examine how and when the brain understands language using event-related potentials (ERPs). She is also beginning to explore which brain areas are associated with language comprehension using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).