When Gwendolyn Gillingham was considering what graduate school she wanted to attend there was one major factor she considered, in addition to the caliber of the university: “I hate the cold,” she states emphatically. “So I really wanted to go someplace warm.”

As a native of eastern Canada, Gillingham has seen her share of bitterly cold winters. She grew up in the city of Ottawa and did her undergraduate work at McGill University in Montreal where she double majored in Linguistics and Psychology. “There were some days in winter when you wouldn’t even leave the house,” she recalls. “It would be minus 35 degrees outside and your body didn’t even want to function.”

It’s no surprise then that Gillingham elected to study at UC San Diego where she is currently a first year graduate student working on her Ph.D. in Linguistics. Of course, it wasn’t just the lure of warm winters that drew her to campus, it was also the promise of the university’s interdisciplinary approach.

“I wanted to continue the honors thesis work in linguistics I did at McGill as well as study cognitive science,” she says. “UCSD has one of the strongest cognitive science departments and is a really great place for doing experimental work. The decision to attend was kind of a no-brainer really.”

Gillingham’s current research focuses on pragmatics, which is the study of how utterances are used in communication, and specifically, drawing inferences beyond the compositional meaning of a sentence.

“If you say something like ‘I'm out of gas’ and your friend responds ‘There's a gas station on the next corner’ then your friend has made an inference that you needed gas, even though you didn’t specifically request to know the location of a gas station,” she explains. “Human beings are actually surprisingly good at figuring out why things are uttered in particular ways.”

Her interests also lie in computational psycholinguistics and trying to come up with models that predict how people behave with regard to pragmatic inferences. She loves to conduct research mostly to satisfy her own curiosity, but says that there are potential applications with regards to computer science.

“There are companies like Google that really want to have a better understanding of the way humans understand language,” she says. “It would be useful for them to understand what people are looking for in their searches so they can yield better search results and better target ads.”

While the high tech industry sounds appealing to her, she isn’t sure just yet where her path ultimately lies. Her immediate goal is to complete a joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science—an undertaking that usually averages about seven years—and then embark on her career. She hasn’t ruled out a life in academia—her father is a professor and she loves the idea of becoming one—but she also thinks she would be happy at a high tech firm working on language-related software. One thing she is certain of is that she would love to end up someplace warm.

“I have these fantasies of moving to Hawaii,” she says. “Maybe to the island of Oahu. It’s got population density, beaches, macadamia nuts, pineapple. That could work.”