Kiel Christianson received a Ph.D. in linguistics and cognitive science from Michigan State University in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has been an assistant professor in the Departments of Educational Psychology and Psychology since 2004.
Prior to his doctoral studies, he was a member of the founding faculty at the University of Aizu, in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan, where he taught and conducted research for four years.
His fields of research center on psycholinguistics and reading, including syntactic parsing, visual word recognition, language production, shallow (or "good enough") processing in language comprehension, and bilingual language processing. Other areas of interest include second language acquisition and the integration of linguistic and non-linguistic information.
Honors: NSF CAREER Award; Arnold O. Beckman Research Award; UIUC Campus Research Board; Fulbright fellow (1988, 2000).