Vicky T. Lai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Program of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Arizona. She received her doctoral training in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she used measures of brain electrical activity (ERPs) to study how people understand metaphorical language. During her postdoctoral training in the Neurobiology of Language Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, she expanded the scope of her research to include emotion, exploring the role of emotion in language, using ERPs and functional MRI. She then continued her postdoctoral training in the Language, Concepts, and the Brain Laboratory at the University of South Carolina, where she examined the embodiment of language through metaphor.