Ev's Unofficial Bio

I was born in and grew up in Volgograd, a city in southern Russia (then Soviet Union). My mom was a mechanical engineer and later a patent law consultant, and my dad was a professional soccer player and later a tower crane operator. My mom raised me telling me that I can do anything, be anyone if I wanted to and worked hard. This powerful notion became and remains deeply embedded in my brain. It’s really a very American way of thinking, and I still don’t quite know how my mom (born in the 1950s in the USSR) had this idealism in her, this vision; but I will be forever grateful to her for what she enabled me to become. I was very loved growing up, but it was a challenging life, especially when the country fell apart in 1991 and my mom lost her job. We, like many other families, lived through years of hunger, uncertainty, and pain. In 1995, at age 15, I was selected to take part in a program that places kids from the former Soviet Union in an American family for a year. I spent a year in Alabama living with a wonderful family who I am still close to, and doing so solidified my decision to apply to colleges in the US (I had previously planned to go to Sorbonne). So I came back to Russia and spent two years preparing my college applications while working several jobs to help support my parents and to save money to take the standardized tests and to pay for postage. I was accepted to Harvard on a full need-based scholarship, and started in 1998. I took some classes at MIT through cross-registration, and then two things happened. First, I knew right away that MIT was the place I wanted to spend more time at—it just felt like home. And second, I met a man who later became my husband and the love of my life. So I came to MIT for grad school in 2002 and worked with two fantastic mentors: Ted Gibson, and then Nancy Kanwisher. Ted taught me about language, Nancy taught me about the brain, both taught me to do meaningful, rigorous, and robust science. Eventually (in 2019), I came back to MIT as a faculty member. And now, I get to work with a team of smart, creative, hard-working, and kind people to figure out how language works in the brain. Oh, and Ted and I also have a doggie and a daughter (pics on family page).