Malka Rappaport Hovav graduated from MIT in 1984 with a thesis on phonological and morphological aspects of Tiberian Hebrew. She was associated with the Lexicon Project at the Center for Cognitive Science at MIT in the years 1984 – 1987. She taught linguistics in the English department at Bar Ilan from 1984 – 1999, when she moved to HU. She is a founding member of the Language, Logic and Cognition Center.  Her work focuses on lexical semantics and its interface with morphosyntax and conceptual categories, with papers published on nominalizations, adjectival passives, lexical aspect, diathesis alternations such as the causative alternation and the dative alternation and conceptual categories such as manner and result.  She is author with Beth Levin of Unaccusativity (MIT Press, 1995) and Argument Realization (CUP, 2005) and editor, with Edit Doron and Ivy Sichel of Syntax, Lexical Semantics and Event Structure (OUP 2010).