Despina Papadopoulou
Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH)
Despina Papadopoulou is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece. Her research expertise lies in psycholinguistics, first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, language processing, migrant education, and language disorders.
She received her PhD in Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics from the University of Essex (2002). She also holds an MA in Language Acquisition (University of Essex, with distinction), an MA in Teaching Greek as a Second/Foreign Language (University of Athens, with distinction), and a BA in Linguistics (University of Athens).
Professor Despina Papadopoulou has held academic appointments at the University of Essex, the University of Crete, the University of the Aegean, Cyprus College, and AUTH, where she has progressed through the ranks of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and, since 2019, Full Professor. She has extensive experience teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in general linguistics, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, bilingual development and education, language processing, and research methods in linguistics.
Her research combines experimental psycholinguistics, corpus-based approaches, and educational applications. She has led and participated in numerous nationally and internationally funded research projects. She currently serves as Coordinator and Principal Investigator of the European AMIF-funded project “ACT & Connect for Integration (ACTIN)” (2024–2027), which promotes the integration of migrant children and adolescents in education. She has also acted as Principal Investigator of the “Teach4Integration” training programs for educators working with refugee and migrant populations, and as Principal Investigator within the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie project “The Multilingual Mind (MultiMind)”, focusing on grammatical and lexical development in migrant primary school children.
Professor Despina Papadopoulou has authored and edited several books and has published extensively in leading international journals, including Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Journal of Linguistics, Lingua, Journal of Child Language, International Journal of Bilingualism, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, The Modern Language Journal, and Glossa. Her work addresses sentence processing, ambiguity resolution, morphological and aspectual development, bilingual acquisition, language disorders, and pedagogical translanguaging.
She has supervised numerous doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, with several PhD dissertations completed with distinction, and has served on advisory and examining committees in Greece and internationally. She has delivered invited lectures and plenary talks at universities and conferences across Europe.
Her research advances theoretical models of language processing and bilingual development while informing evidence-based language teaching practices, particularly in multilingual and migrant educational contexts.
Since 2023, she has served as Chair of the Supervisory Committee of the School of Modern Greek and as Coordinator of the Scientific Committee of the Child Rights Center at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.