Gary Dell is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his Ph.D in Psychology at the University of Toronto in 1980, and subsequently held academic positions at Dartmouth College and the University of Rochester, before coming to Illinois in 1989. He received the APA Early Career Award in 1987 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

Dell's research deals with how people produce, comprehend, and learn language, and how these processes can be modeled using neural networks. He has developed models that make predictions about the properties of everyday “slips of the tongue”. These predictions are tested using procedures in which participants produce words and sentences under controlled conditions. Also, by changing the model’s processing characteristics, it can produce the speech error patterns of various types of aphasic patients. Recent work has used voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping in aphasia to link model parameters to brain regions. Other recent research topics include: structural priming in production, the effect of driving on language use, monitoring and attention in production, optical imaging of the neural signal during sentence processing, prediction in sentence processing, memory for word co-occurrences, and production mechanisms for timing and intonation. In his most recent work, he developed a theory of learning within the production system that attempts to link accounts of speech errors, implicit sequential learning, memory consolidation, and critical periods for language learning.