Suzanne Kemmer is a specialist in Cognitive Linguistics and has worked extensively in Lexical Semantics, Language Typology and Universals research, Morphology, Historical Linguistics, History of English, Corpus Linguistics, and Language and the Brain. She has also done fieldwork on Kapampangan, Malagasy, Luo, Pulaar (Fula), and Azeri.  She was President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA) from 2001-2005 and served on the ICLA Governing Board from 1999-2007. She has taught at the LSA Institute at UC Santa Barbara in 2001 and at CU Boulder in 2011. She has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in 2000 and at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich 2016-19, among others. She has lectured widely on her research, giving keynote lectures in the U.S., Sweden, Germany, Kenya, Japan, Poland, China, Korea, Croatia, and Taiwan, and other lectures in the U.S. and around the world. She has directed 12 doctoral theses in Linguistics and has served as an extramural member or examiner on numerous others. She has organized and co-organized a number of conferences and workshops in Linguistics and adjacent fields, most recently "LLMs and the Brain" at the Rice University Biosciences Research Collaborative, Sept. 2025 (co-organizer, Dr. Ben Hayden, Baylor College of Medicine). She has been a consultant on several legal cases, applying corpus linguistics to trademark disputes. In other public outreach, she has given lectures to various public groups about language and linguistics, and been interviewed on radio and in the popular press.  Her current collaborative research projects include a project on multimodality in lexical blending; one on the investigation of neural processing of language using LLMs, and a project on the development of a computational tool for automatic phonetic segmentation for endangered and underrepresented languages (with co-PIs at the University of Houston Dept. of Computer Science).

Positions held

• Associate Professor  of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences, Dept. of Linguistics, Rice University, 1995-present. Assistant Professor 1993-95. Director of Cognitive Sciences, 2007-2014; Director of Neuroscience,  Nov. 2010-Jan. 2013
• Faculty, Summer Symposium on Exploring the Mind through Music, Shepherd School of Music, Rice University, June 2011. 
• Visiting Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, CU Boulder, LSA Institute, Summer 2011
• Keck Center Faculty member, Gulf Coast Consortia on Interdisciplinary Biosciences Training 2008-present 
• Visiting Professor, Shanghai International University, Shanghai, China, Graduate Summer Institute in Cognition, Communication and Culture, June 2008 
• Visiting Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara, LSA faculty, Summer 2001
• Assistant Professor of Linguistics and the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Sciences, Dept. of Linguistics, U.C. San Diego, 1988-1993