He received his M.A. in Political Science from the City University of New York. His professional experience has been in educational and learning technologies. He has developed and taught Kurmanji-Kurdish courses at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. His Kurmanji-Kurdish Reader, a multi-level reference tool with an extensive grammar section, was published by Dunwoody Press in 2007. He also led a project to compile and edit a Kurmanji bilingual lexicon to be used in machine translation software. His research interests are language variation and the role of language in the nation-building process. His current research focuses on the discursive construction of national identity in the Kurdish journals of late 19th and early 20th centuries.