Kiel Christianson has taught at the university level in Germany, Japan, and the U.S. He is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, and conducted the first "field-psycholinguistics" study on syntactic processing in any indigenous North American language (Odawa). He is currently Director of the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab at the Beckman Institute, and Associate Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology. His research has been funded by NSF, NIH, and Procter & Gamble.

Dr. Christianson studies syntactic parsing, sentence comprehension in reading and listening, reading, language production, bilingualism, and morphological processing.