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January 2024
Siena Christensen, a native of Provo, has always been interested in languages.
When she was young, her mother taught French at Utah Valley University and in their home. Later, Christensen was called to serve a mission in Brazil. While learning Portuguese, she realized that the process of learning new languages fascinated her.
After her mission, Christensen enrolled at BYU as a linguistics major so that she could study the mechanics of how people learn new languages. She is also earning minors in Portuguese and linguistic computing. Thanks to a donor-funded grant, Christensen was able to join a research team and start measuring the brainwave activity of subjects learning words in a new language.
“We hope to see what language acquisition looks like neurologically,” she says.
Christensen has presented findings for other language-related research projects at conferences in Portland, Oregon, and Lyon, France. At these conferences, she networked with linguists and linguistic researchers from around the world and learned about their work.
“It was inspiring,” she says, “I am so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had at BYU.”
When Walter Barrus experienced devastating hardships, Brigham Young University helped transform his life for the better. Margaret Barrus’s BYU degree, earned later in life, opened doors for her as a computer programmer. Today, they are using a planned gift to improve the lives of others at BYU and beyond.
When Kika Londoño was eight years old, her family moved from Utah to Colombia for a year and a half. During this formative time, she came to love Latin America and the Spanish language.
Many students benefit from mentoring opportunities on campus that are sponsored by donors. And although Katie King knew that her scholarship and many of the facilities at BYU were provided by donors, she was surprised to learn that her job is donor-funded as well.
For many students receiving a scholarship or other financial assistance from donors is a blessing. For others it can only be described as “life-changing”.
Researchers at BYU’s Computational Health Science Research Collaborative are crunching data to see how Reddit users search for and sift through medical information and how this has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic.