I was born and raised in Tehran. So my mother tongue is Persian. When I was 12-13 we lived in Kent, England for over a year and that’s when I learnt English. When I graduated high School, I started teaching English as a second language (ESL) to adults at a language school. For my undergraduate, I studied Biology. I knew I liked to learn more about living systems, but I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to study. My father, who was a Professor of Microbiology, suggested that I studied Biology. He called it the mother of Sciences and he argued that Biology would give me the opportunity to specialize in many fields, once I figure out what I wanted to do. I was in my last year of undergraduate program, and nothing had interested me much. Until finally, in the last semester, I had a course on Neuroscience. I loved it. I was fascinated by the brain, and how it functions. During a session, my professor mentioned briefly that processing a second language is different from processing the mother tongue. Being an ESL teacher at the time, I was inspired to learn more on this. In Iran, there were no graduate programs focusing on Neuroscience/Neuropsychology of language learning at the time (we are talking about almost 20 years ago, and a lot has changed since then). So I decided to move to Canada for my graduate studies. That’s how I enrolled in a PhD program (masters/PhD together), in Neuropsychology and focused on a project that used Neuroimaging (fMRI) to see how the brain learns a second language as an adult.