Prof. Despina Papadopoulou was born in Thessaloniki in 1964. She studied law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1982-1986). She completed her postgraduate studies in the social sciences, with a specialization in Sociology, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) (1988-1989). She received her doctorate in 1994 from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is a Professor at the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University in the field of the Sociology of Change and Exclusion and is the Head of the Department. Her research includes psycholinguistics, language acquisition, language, language learning, applied linguistics, language teaching, foreign language learning, language development, speech and language processing, and second language acquisition.