Theresa Matzinger is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in cognition, language, behaviour, and biology. She completed her PhD at the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna and held postdoctoral positions at the Centre of Language Evolution Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Theresa's research aims to shed light on the cognitive constraints and communicative pressures underlying similarities and differences between languages, as well as between human language and non-human animal communication systems. Her work spans the biological and cultural evolution of language(s), language learning, historical language change, and non-human animal communication and cognition. In recent years, she has been investigating social and aesthetic factors that influence how languages are perceived, acquired, and used. In her current research, she is extending her work to the study of budgerigar vocalisations, and exploring their acoustic properties and social functions.

In her research, she combines methods from the fields of psycholinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, behavioral economics, bioacoustics, and behavioral biology.