Dieter Hillert
Dieter Gilberto Hillert () is a German-American biolinguist and cognitive scientist. His research focuses on the human language faculty as a cognitive and neurological system. He is known for work on the neurobiology of language, real-time sentence processing, and language evolution. He advocates comparative evolutionary studies of cognition, argues against tabula rasa models, and favors computational theories of mind. Hillert was born in Wiesbaden-Sonnenberg (West Germany) in 1956, as second son of Guido Joachim Hillert, an aerospace and civil engineer, and his wife Charlotte Hillert, née Holland-Cunz. He spent his youth in Wiesbaden and attended  Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He was clinically trained in neurolinguistics at the medical school of the RWTH Aachen, Germany. Hillert received his degrees up to the Ph.D. and Habilitation (Priv.-Doz.) from the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His academic career started as a post-doc for neurolinguistics in France at the Centre Paul Broca in Paris, in the United States at Boston University and MIT, in Canada at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He was then appointed as a lecturer at the University of Manchester in England, and continued his academic career at  the University of California, San Diego in the United States. At present, he is an adjunct professor at San Diego State University. Occasionally, he lectures in Japan, inter alia, at the Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo. He contributes to the science of language by publishing theoretical and experimental research on various language-related themes such as sentence processing, figurative language, semantics and syntax, bilingualism, aphasia, and language evolution. He received several awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.