Ph.D, 2009
Department of Linguistics
University of Washington
email: sfd at u dot washington dot edu

I received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1992. After graduation I worked in the computer industry for several years as a software engineer, eventually working on the Microsoft FrontPage editor. In 2001, I began taking linguistics classes at the University of Washington, then applied and was accepted into the Linguistics program in 2002. I completed my Master's Degree in Fall quarter, 2004, and my Ph.D. in Spring quarter, 2009.  My dissertation research involved adding support for case, person, number, gender, and agreement to the Grammar Matrix customization system.

I served as the GPSS Senator from the Linguistics department in 2002-2003. In 2004-2005, I was the Social Chair for the LSUW (Linguistics Society at the University of Washington). For several years, I managed the UW Computational Linguistics Wiki. I worked as a research assistant for several quarters in 2004 (and occasionally afterwards) on the Vocal Joystick project. In 2005, I implemented a coordination module for the LinGO Grammar Matrix (see below for a paper about it), on which work continues. In autumn of 2005, I was a TA in Linguistics 100. I spent autumn of 2006 as a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where I studied the typology of case, number, person, and agreement.

My interests include computational linguistics, various syntaces, typology, corpus linguistics, and everything else having to do with human language. I am a native speaker of English, a stilted and only partially literate speaker of Japanese, and I can puzzle my way through French, German, and Latin. I also have the barest smattering of self-taught Western Armenian. (Expect more languages in the future.)