I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at Lawrence Technological University. 

My research focus is on semantic cognition,. I am interested in how we build semantic representations from linguistic and bodily experience, and how we access and manipulate those representations in complex language understanding, such as metaphor.  

I use experimental, neuropsychological, and computational approaches.

My teaching interests are in cognitive psychology, experimental psychology lab, and the history of psychology.

A little more about me:

• I serve on editorial boards for Cognitive Processing, Metaphor and Symbol, and the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology

• I recently organized and hosted the 17th Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM) conference at LTU.

Latest research:

• Al-Azary, H., Hess, M., Koje, J., Ebaugh, A., Tran, S., & Adcock, Z. (2026). Anodal Stimulation of the Left-Inferior Frontal Gyrus Reduces Metaphor Comprehensibility. Brain and Cognition., 198.

• Al-Azary, H., & Reid, J. N. (2026). Metaphor is a Key to Abstraction: Modelling Figurative Abstraction with Distributional Semantics. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 48). 

• Mangiaterra, V., Al-Azary, H., Pietro, C. B. D. S., Canal, P., & Bambini, V. (2025). Can GPT replace human raters? Validity and reliability of machine-generated norms for metaphors. arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.12444.