He is an alumnus of the University of Kansas (Ph.D. 2006) and has primary research interests in the following areas: Germanic linguistics, philosophy of language, bilingualism, learnability and linguistic theory, morphology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and heritage linguistics (including Pennsylvania German). He is the author of Scrambling and the Survive Principle (2007) and editor of Towards a Derivational Syntax: Survive-minimalism (2009), Exploring Crash-Proof Grammars (2010) and Studies on German-language Islands (2011). He has also published in a variety of journals, including Linguistic Analysis, The Linguistic Review, The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, Syntax and Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. He teaches various courses in German and Linguistics at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and also serves as the lower-division coordinator for the undergraduate German program.