Lonneke van der Plas is head of the Computation, Cognition and Language group at the Idiap research institute in Martigny, and Associate Professor in Language Technology, in affiliation with the University of Malta. She previously held a junior-professorship at the University of Stutgart, and a postdoc position at the University of Geneva. She earned a PhD from the University of Groningen and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge.

She has been leading several research projects under SNF, Innosuisse, H2020, Erasmus+, and the German Research Foundation, many of which are interdisciplinary projects with colleagues from linguistics, cognitive sciences, management studies etc.

She was visiting fellow at the University of Zurich, the University of Melbourne, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and has over 50 publications in the field of natural language processing, more in particular on the following topics: multi-lingual natural language processing, computational semantics, and more recently, computational creativity.