I am the Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre, part of the Department of Engineering Science. I have been doing interdisciplinary research in experimental and computational linguistics throughout my career. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I studied linguistics and mathematics. My Ph.D thesis from MIT developed a model of English prosody and intonation. Much of the research was carried out in the Linguistics and AI Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories, where I also served as a Member of Technical Staff. I then joined the Linguistics faculty at Northwestern University, where I served terms as department chair and director of graduate studies. In May 2015, I moved to Oxford, where my research group is focussed on computational linguistics and natural language processing, with the goal of creating robust and beneficial language technology as well as formalizing and testing theories in the language sciences. I have a courtesy appointment at Oxford in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics. I am a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, and an Associate Member of the Oxford Man Institute.
I am one of the founding members of the Association for Laboratory Phonology,. I am a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Cognitive Science Society. I was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences . in 2019, and in 2024 I became a member of the Academia Europaea.