Valeria Pfeifer

Dr. Valeria Pfeifer is the Principal Investigator of the Language & Cognition Lab at UMKC! She joined UMKC in the Fall of 2025 as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology and Counseling Department. 

From 2022 to Spring 2025, Dr. Pfeifer was a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Arizona, in Dr. Matthias Mehl's Naturalistic Observation of Social Interaction Lab. Here, she worked as part of the Precision Aging Network investigating language in older adults.

Dr. Pfeifer earned her Ph.D. in May of 2022 from The University of Arizona, under the mentorship of Dr. Vicky Lai and as a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language lab. Here, she investigated the neural correlates of verbal irony, metaphor, emojis, and more. 

Dr. Pfeifer further holds a B.A. and a M.A. degree in Linguistics from Bielefeld University.