Team Members

Real Reason was launched in 2006 through a year-long volunteer effort by its four founders: Erik Sahlin, Anat Shenker-Osorio, Nancy Urban, and Alyssa Wulf. Today, the Real Reason team includes:

Alyssa Wulf
Principal and Director of Programs
wulf@RealReason.org

As Principal and Director of Programs, Alyssa manages the core intellectual work of the organization, ensuring that it draws from the best of the fields of cognitive science and linguistics, and that it is conducted in partnership with social change activists and advocates.

Alyssa has worked in the fields of cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics for over a decade — conducting and publishing original research, applying language data analysis to political problems, and teaching in both university and community education settings. Previously, as a senior linguist at the Rockridge Institute, she managed the primary client engagements and research projects, leading efforts to develop new applications of cognitive linguistics to political issues. At Real Reason, Alyssa has directed strategic analysis for partners including the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, the Longview Institute, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

For 15 years Alyssa has been active in Deaf advocacy, partnering with Deaf communities in three states. This involved work at a number of nonprofit organizations, where she provided support for people seeking assistance under the Americans with Disabilities Act, promoted student arts initiatives, and developed community awareness workshops. Alyssa is fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and is a trained interpreter. Through her academic work on ASL, Alyssa has developed particular expertise in the physical and visual dimensions of communication.

Alyssa holds an M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet University, a B.A. in Psychology from Wesleyan University, and has completed work toward a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Erik Sahlin
Managing Director
sahlin@RealReason.org

Erik guides Real Reason's organizational development, working closely with the Board of Directors and consulting with experts in the nonprofit community. His areas of responsibility include managing legal matters, personnel policies, information technology systems, financial administration, and long-term strategic planning. Erik also participates in project management, and applies his analytical skills and political experience to the intellectual work of the organization.

Previously, Erik served as Managing Director of the Rockridge Institute, where he drew on his graduate-level training in business management and nonprofit fundraising, as well as his expertise in politics, history and language. He developed the Institute's operations and finances, facilitated the creation of research plans, and supervised and supported all full-time personnel.

Erik has 15 years of experience designing and executing research projects on political movements, in particular analyzing the relationship between technological change and political change in China, and has taught American and Chinese history and politics at the university level. Erik's background includes involvement in local politics in rural Minnesota, work in state government as an aide to the Minnesota House Redistricting Committee, and participation in youth leadership development programs.

Erik lived and studied in Taiwan and China for three years and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. He holds a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, and has completed work toward a Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jenny Lederer
Research Associate
lederer@RealReason.org

Jenny is a key contributor to a wide range of Real Reason's ongoing research and analytical work. As a Research Associate, she applies her doctoral training in cognitive linguistics to analysis of how people think and communicate. Her particular areas of focus include pregnancy and reproductive rights, as well as money and taxation.

Jenny has over 7 years of experience working in the field of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was a major study on the grammar of the reflexive "self" in American English. In addition, she has published and presented original research on other areas of linguistics, including phoenetics and language revitalization. Her extensive work on corpus-based semantic analysis provides her with particular expertise in linguistic data coding and evaluation. Jenny has taught undergraduates in topics in cognitive linguistics ranging from conceptual metaphor and frame analysis to modern theories of the mind as applied to politics.

Jenny earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her B.A. in Psychology and Language Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Karin Martin
Board Chair
martin@RealReason.org

As Chair of Real Reason's Board of Directors, Karin oversees the organization's governance — ensuring that it maintains legal compliance, remains consistent with its mission and values in serving the public good, and continually strives to realize its potential.

Karin has over a decade of experience working for and with nonprofit organizations, and most recently worked as a fundraising and management consultant, serving nonprofits across the country.

In her doctoral studies, Karin's primary research interests are examining value versus information-based decision making as they relate to policy-making and voting; the political impact of advocacy organizations and think tanks; and the institutional framework of policy creation. Her Master's thesis was "The Model State Policy for the Treatment of the Wrongfully Convicted." She is currently a Graduate Student Instructor for Robert Reich's course on "Leadership & Social Change." She is also conducting research on the impact of race on the willingness of jurors to convict a defendant and on drug policy in the United States.

Karin holds an A.B. degree in Psychology from Stanford University, and a Master of Public Policy degree from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now completing a doctoral program.

Sarah Berson
Research Associate
berson@RealReason.org

In her role as Research Associate, Sarah is a member of Real Reason's core research team, applying cognitive linguistics to analysis of political reasoning. She was drawn to Real Reason by her interest in finding new ways to apply her academic training to social justice issues, such as the problem of resource distribution.

Sarah's professional career has been dedicated to research and teaching in linguistics, with a specific focus on construction grammar, psycholinguistics, and historical semantics. She has taught the analytical tools of cognitive linguistics to undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-organized an international linguistics converence convened by the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Sarah received fellowships to continue her studies at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute and at Princeton University, and she has had work published on the topic of group discourse patterns. For two years, Sarah was a Research Associate at the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was engaged in research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brain function during linguistic and spatial reasoning tasks.

Sarah holds an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology from Washington University.