Our Team

Meet the researchers, students, and staff behind our work.

Principal Investigators

Dr. Sveta Fichman

Principal Investigator

Bio

Dr. Sveta Fichman is a clinical linguist, researcher, and university lecturer specializing in the complex interaction of bilingualism, language acquisition, and atypical speech and language development. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Linguistics and serves as a faculty member and lecturer at several academic institutions, including Jerusalem Interdisciplinary College (Department of Communication Disorders) and Talpiot College of Education (Child Development). Her current research focuses on manifestations of stuttering in children and adolescents from diverse Heritage Language backgrounds. In 2026, she and Dr. Dvora Freud were awarded a prestigious Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grant to lead a multidisciplinary study investigating communication strategies and attitudes among bilingual school-age children.

Fun fact: I don't just study bilingualism — I live it. My brain is constantly toggling between languages.

Dr. Dvora Freud

Co-Principal Investigator

Bio

Dr. Dvora Freud co-leads our ISF-funded project on stuttering across languages. Her research sits at the intersection of speech-language pathology, bilingualism, and clinical practice with Hebrew-speaking and heritage-language communities.

Fun fact: [Fun fact to fill in]

Team & Research Assistants

Dr. Yuliya Leshchenko

Project Coordinator

I study bilingualism professionally — and at home with my two children, I see it happening all the time as we mix languages without even noticing 😊

Itamar Guy

Speech-Language Pathologist & Research Tool Developer

I taught my toddler son words and sentences in 8 languages: Hebrew, English, Arabic, Yiddish, Spanish, French, Chinese, and even Indonesian.

Bar Fiszerman

Research Assistant

I’m addicted to sport and working out.

Bella Katzin

Research Assistant

My research interests aren’t limited to multilingualism — they extend to life itself. Because, in the end, life is just one big research project 😊

Yulia Vymorozko

PhD Candidate

I moved countries to study language acquisition — and ended up researching the same challenges I have experienced, and still do 😊

Ella Shats

MA Candidate, Linguistics

I studied Finnish for 10 years in school 🙂

Maayan Aharoni

Research Assistant

I work at a bookstore and love being surrounded by books — reading as much as I can 📚

How to become a Research Assistant

We welcome motivated students and researchers. If you care about bilingualism, stuttering, or cross-language development, get in touch.

Collaborations

We partner with clinicians, researchers, and community organizations across Israel and internationally.