Evelina Leivada is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her focus is on language variation and bilingual development. She got her PhD in Cognitive Science and Language from Universitat de Barcelona in 2015. In 2017-2019, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. Funded by the European Commission, she developed the project ‘Disentangling Variation’, which examined how variation in the linguistic input affects development in bilingual and bidialectal populations. In 2020, she joined Universitat Rovira i Virgili as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow, working on grammar processing in different groups of bilinguals. Since December 2025, she serves as the director of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Evelina is a psycholinguist. Her research brings together both the cognitive and the sociolinguistic aspects of the ability to acquire and use language through investigating of the effects of developmental trajectory on language and cognition. She specializes in bilingual development. More broadly, her research interests include language variation and how this affects the process of development, language acquisition in monolingual, bilingual, and bidialectal contexts, and theoretical linguistics. Supporting an interdisciplinary approach to language, Evelina is Associate Editor for Psycholinguistics in the Diamond Open Access journal Biolinguistics.