He previously held positions at the University of Groningen, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He received a BA in Linguistics and Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo in 1992 and a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University in 1998. His research interests include computational linguistics, statistical language modeling and theoretical morphosyntax. His current work is focused on information-theoretic approaches to inflectional morphology.