Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is pleased to share the news that Dr. Payman Vafaee has just been appointed as full-time Lecturer at Columbia University in the Department of Applied Linguistics. He will be teaching M.A. and Ph.D. level courses in Second Language Assessment, Second Language Acquisition and Quantitative Research Methods. Dr. Vafaee has also recently been appointed Director of Research and Development at Second Language Testing Inc., in Princeton, NJ, where he focuses on the development of tests of language skills and the translation of standardized tests.

Dr. Vafaee earned his Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, in 2016. While at UMD, he taught Persian classes at the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, under the leadership of Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz, and was awarded a Roshan Institute Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies for the completion of his doctoral dissertation, “The Relative Significance of Syntactic and Vocabulary Knowledge in Second Language Listening Comprehension”. Dr. Vafaee has publications in peer-reviewed journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and has presented at numerous international conferences.

Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute extends its congratulations to Dr. Vafaee for his achievements and to Professor Keshavarz for her excellent work in carrying out the mission of the Institute.