Congratulations, Monica!

Congratulations to Monica Irimia, who has accepted a two-year postdoctoral research position at the University of York (England) at the Centre for Comparative and Historical Syntax, where she will work with Professor Giuseppe Longobardi on the ERC-funded project "Meeting Darwin's last challenge: Toward a global tree of human languages and genes." 

This is a highly innovative project which is described on LinguistList (23.5244) as planning to "build the first phylogenetic trees of languages based on syntactic evidence ... and to compare them to the molecular-genetic representation of corresponding populations. The project will apply a new comparative method, based entirely on grammatical evidence and on recent parametric theories of syntactic diversity, to ensure higher standards of testability/replicability and measure linguistic distances between even remote populations. A team of linguists at York and one of biologists in Italy will for the first time jointly select the populations most significant from either perspective for language/gene sampling." 

Congratulations, Monica, on joining this exciting team!