Barbara Lust is Professor Emerita at Cornell University where she has taught and conducted research in the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab for about 40 years. Her work is centered in Cognitive Science, with specializations in both Linguistics and Developmental Psychology. She has co-directed and served the interdisciplinary Cognitive Science program at Cornell, and currently with Prof. Maria Blume, co-directs the Virtual Center for Language Acquisition. After studying at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, she completed her graduate training in Developmental Psychology with a minor in linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and post-doctoral training in the department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. She was influential in the establishment of section Z, Linguistics and the Language Sciences, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and now with Prof. Blume has co-directed a program supported by the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Program involving a transformation of the primary research process through cyberinfrastructure development to support collaborative interdisciplinary cross-linguistic research and related data management. Prof. Lust’s major research interests concern the acquisition of language by the child, with an emphasis on an interdisciplinary cognitive science approach, including the study of multilingualism. She has developed a cross-linguistic research paradigm which seeks to dissociate universal and language specific factors in order to develop a comprehensive theory of language acquisition. More recently, with collaborators at MIT (Suzanne Flynn) and Massachusetts General Hospital (Janet Cohen Sherman), her work considers the dissolution of language in dementia in the elderly in comparison to language development in first language acquisition, and their neuroscientific foundations. With Cornell University Library she oversees at Cornell a special collection (“Words of the World’s Children”) of over two thousand language samples of language acquisition data from children in over 14 countries/languages across the world, created by the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab and the Virtual Center for Language Acquisition through collaboration with past and present students and other collaborators. She, with her colleagues, has written over 135 articles and books and presented at more than 180 national and international research conferences.