Teenie Matlock is the McClatchy Chair in Communications and the Director of the Center for Climate Communication at UC Merced. A cognitive scientist and linguist by training, she is interested in how people use and understand language. Some of her research examines how the content of political campaign messages affects voters. Other work investigates how metaphors are interpreted “in the wild”, for instance, in natural discourse about technology, math, or politics, or how grammatical form influences reasoning about past events. Professor Matlock is the Associate Editor for Cognitive Linguistics and serves on the editorial boards of Metaphor & Symbol as well as Environmental Communication. She is a member of on the Cognitive Science Society governing board and a standing member of NIH’s Language and Communication Study Section (LCOM). She is the former Vice Chair of the American Indian Council of Mariposa County, and was raised in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in California.