Evelina G. Fedorenko (born 1980) is a Russian-born American cognitive neuroscientist.

Born in 1980 in Volgograd in the Soviet Union, Fedorenko moved to the United States in 1998.^[1] In 2002, she graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in psychology and linguistics. She then went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for her graduate degree in cognitive science and neuroscience, receiving her Ph.D in 2007.^[2]

As of February 2024, Fedorenko is a tenured professor and laboratory head^[3] in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a research affiliate at Massachusetts General Hospital.^[4]

Her specialty is the human language system. Her goal is to try to provide a representation of our brain regions and to study individuals who have healthy brain regions and who have brain disorders. She is also trying to understand the calculations that we perform in our everyday life. During her research she uses different kinds of methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), ERPs and intracranial recordings.^[2] One of her areas of research is the brains of polyglots, who speak multiple languages.^[1] This research has been featured in The New Yorker magazine^[1] and the BBC World Service documentary, The Polyglots.^[5]

In 2007, she received the Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00 career development award) from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).^[2]

She is married to Ted Gibson, a cognitive scientist at MIT.^[1]

• Stix, Gary, "Thinking without Words: Cognition doesn't require language, it turns out" (interview with Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 3 (March 2025), pp. 86–88. "[I]n the tradition of linguist Noam Chomsky... we use language for thinking: to think is why language evolved in our species. [However, evidence that thought and language are separate systems is found, for example, by] looking at deficits in different abilities – for instance, in people with brain damage... who have impairments in language – some form of aphasia [ – yet are clearly able to think]." (p. 87.) Conversely, "large language models such as GPT-2... do language very well [but t]hey're not so good at thinking, which... nicely align[s] with the idea that the language system by itself is not what makes you think." (p. 88.)

• Evelina Fedorenko publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Ev Fedorenko's Language Lab