Christopher Kaiser is the Associate Director of the Columbia University Language Resource Center. He received his B.A. in Italian and Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh, his M.A. in Italian Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and his Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Yale University. His areas of interest include second language pedagogy, distance learning, artificial intelligence, individualization, inter-institutional collaboration, climate and language, and language-learning advocacy.

He is the current president of the Northeast Association for Language Learning Technology (NEALLT), and he serves on the Modern Language Association Task Force on World Languages and Generative AI.

He is also the host of Said & Done, the LRC’s monthly podcast about language learning.

Vera Felder is the Program Manager of the Shared Course Initiative, an inter-institutional collaboration between Columbia, Cornell, and Yale Universities for supporting and sustaining less commonly taught languages.

Before joining Columbia’s Language Resource Center, she earned her doctorate degree from the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley and her M.A. and B.A. in Linguistics from San Francisco State University. Her area of interest is cognitive linguistics with an emphasis on second language acquisition and teaching methodologies.