About

I grew up in the suburbs of New York, in the memorably named town of New City. When it was time for college, my interest in chemistry took me to MIT. After disasters with a separation funnel provided compelling arguments against my becoming a lab scientist, I changed focus to the more theoretical field of Cognitive Science. As an undergraduate, I devoted many memorable hours to hacking on the START system on Lisp Machines in the AI Lab with Boris Katz. I spent even more hours hanging out and playing music with friends at Baker House, where I also learned to appreciate the impact of great architecture. After four years in Cambridge, I shipped off to the department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, I had the great good fortune of finding two excellent advisors, Aravind Joshi and Tony Kroch, in two different departments, and I benefitted enormously from the stimulating interdisciplinary environment of the sadly now defunct Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. I was also incredibly lucky to meet my wife while I was there.

After finishing my PhD, I joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of Delaware, a rare linguistics department (in those days) willing to hire someone without a linguistics PhD. My next adventure was in the Cognitive Science department at Johns Hopkins University. While at JHU, I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, where our family grew to include our two sons, Gabriel and Dani. In Fall 2008, I reversed my southerly journey, and moved to Connecticut, where Raffaella and I joined the Linguistics Department at Yale University.