He has a BA (1983) in linguistics and a PhD (1992) in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and spend 8 years in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder before coming to Stanford just this month. His research focuses on statistical models of human and machine language processing, especially automatic speech recognition and understanding, natural language processing, and computational psycholinguistics. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1998, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, and also has high hopes for his recipe for Three Cups Chicken. His most recent book, with James H. Martin, is the widely-used textbook "Speech and Language Processing". He also plays the drums in mediocre pop bands.