Allyson Ettinger said she is excited to continue exploring ways to create new and exciting research within linguistics, neuroscience and computer science.

The Language Science Center received a $3 million Research Traineeship grant from the National Science Foundation. This grant is part of a five-year NSF Research Traineeship program, which gives graduate students opportunities to enhance their knowledge and skills for more innovative communication techniques.

This grant allows graduate students such as Ettinger, a graduate student in linguistics department, to conduct their interdisciplinary research. It will also help evolve the Language Science Center for its students and their research, said Colin Phillips, the program’s principal investigator, the Language Science Center director and a linguistics professor.

The grant follows a previous NSF grant, the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship award, which expired in 2015. This university’s team is the only team in the nation to win both these awards in any field.

“The goal that the center has for the grant is to modernize and transform how our graduate students conduct their research,” Phillips said.

Computer science professor Hal Daumé also said one of the reasons for the program is to help students enhance their communication skills.

“It’s always a challenge for students to communicate outside their specific research topic,” Daumé said. “It’s harder to communicate without an understanding of what they are researching.”

Ettinger said the NRT grant also gave the center the opportunity to create experimental programs such as Winter Storm 2016.

Winter Storm 2016 was a training workshop that allowed graduate students to collaborate and train one another, Ettinger said.

Phillips said with this NRT grant, language science students will develop skills to approach problems in language science and translation programs.

“Google Translate, although it is good, it isn’t good enough,” Phillips said. “Most of the time when people want to find a translation from one language to the next, Google can only do so much and most of the time gives translations that will not make sense in the language it’s being translated to.”

This grant helps people work together effectively and within the center’s outreach programs, Phillips said.

“Our center gives students the opportunity to visit local high schools to explain what the center does and how they can be involved if they have interest in language science,” Phillips said.

Ettinger said being a part of this program helps her further her research.

“The grant also allows me to have some kind of ownership in what I’m researching,” Ettinger said. “We as [graduate] students get to organize key events that we feel are important to our center and to us personally as students.”

Rochelle Newman, a Language Science Center associate director, also said without this grant, there would be no advancement in their computer science, linguistics, social sciences or any other research because of the boundaries that exist.

“Language is the heart of what we do and without this grant, we wouldn’t be able to help crises around the world because of the scientific boundaries that are presented in every field of study,” Newman said.