Jacob Momsen
The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2025 Dissertation Award recipient: Jacob Momsen
The Dissertation Award is generously sponsored by Brain and Language.
The Conversational Dance: Assessing the Sensorimotor Account of Multimodal Prosody
Friday, September 12, 2025, 10:00 - 11:00 am, Elstad Auditorium
Speaker: Jacob Momsen, Hilibrand Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine (New Haven, Connecticut).
About Jacob Momsen
Jacob Pohaku Momsen is a Hilibrand Postdoctoral Fellow in the McPartland Lab at the Yale Child Study Center within the Yale School of Medicine. He completed his PhD under the guidance of Drs. Seana Coulson and Alyson Abel through the Joint Doctoral Program at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University in the summer of 2024. Prior to his graduate studies, Jacob earned his bachelor’s degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and then spent several years implementing play-based behavior therapy at a clinic for autistic youth, as well as teaching at a secondary school designed to individualize curriculum and adapt the learning environment for children with neurodevelopmental or psychiatric conditions. His dissertation work was framed around a novel hypothesis regarding the neurobiological mechanisms that support the temporal organization of attentional resources to optimally integrate verbal and nonverbal cues during spoken language processing. He is currently extending this work in clinical populations with pragmatic communication differences—e.g., autism—with the goal of advancing both speech and language science and laying the groundwork for future translational research in early diagnostic and therapeutic applications. The results of his dissertation have been published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Open Mind, Neurobiology of Language, Brain and Language, and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and was primarily supported by an NIH T32 Fellowship and an NIDCD Diversity Supplement Award.