Tamara Swaab (Ph.D.) is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. She directs the Laboratory for the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language. Dr. Swaab received her Ph.D. degree from the Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (https://www.mpi.nl/) in the Netherlands. In 2021, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science for her contributions to the understanding of human language and cognition. She was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition between 2020-2025.

Together with her students and collaborators, she has established a research program to investigate the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language comprehension in monolingual and (bimodal) bilingual individuals across the lifespan. Her work spans both typical populations and those with clinical conditions affecting language and cognition, such as aphasia, schizophrenia, and aging-related decline. She uses a multimethod approach—including EEG/ERPs, neural decoding, eye-tracking (in collaboration) and behavioral measures—to understand how people extract meaning from text and conversation. Her research also explores how individual differences in cognitive control, language experience, and neural dynamics shape language processing. This work has been supported continuously since 1997 by grants from the McDonnell-Pew Foundation, NSF, NIMH, and NIA.