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Jack Dempsey, PhD
Psycholinguist – Educational Psychologist – Data Scientist

I work as Director of Research at Cascade Reading, where I test the efficacy of our reading comprehension tool in various populations. In my spare time, I lead and collaborate on academic projects investigating the cognitive mechanisms that underly reading and how readers interpret grammatical structures in text on both sentence and discourse levels.

My passion is to better our understanding of how humans comprehend, remember, and make decisions based on text. My work is aimed at informing advances in technologies that are grounded in modern psychological theory. Intertwined with this is my keen interest in machine learning approaches to large-scale, multivariate data, through which we may better understand the complex web of cognitive skills that allow humans to communicate in a growingly interpersonal and technological world.

I teach a course on developmental linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and work sporadically as a freelance data analyst. In my spare time I practice piano, study world languages, and dabble in mixology.