Theresa Matzinger is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in cognition, language, behavior and biology. After completing her PhD at the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, and a post-doctoral stay at the Centre of Language Evolution Studies at the University of Torun, she currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of English at the University of Vienna.

Theresa's main research goal is to shed light on the cognitive constraints and communicative pressures that led to similarities and differences between languages. Her work focuses on the biological and cultural evolution of language(s), language learning, historical language change, and non-human animal communication and cognition. Presently, she is extending her research to social and aesthetic factors that may influence how languages are acquired and used. In her research, she combines methods from the fields of psycholinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, behavioral economics, and behavioral biology.