A warm welcome to this year’s cohort of PhD students! Here’s a brief introduction to the first-years:

Andrea Beltrama was born and raised in Sondrio, in the Italian Alps. He earned his B.A. and MA in Linguistics at the University of Bologna, and, on his way to graduation, had a chance to spend two academic years as an exchange student at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. His interests include phenomena at the semantics/pragmatics interface, psycholinguistics and linguistic anthropology. When he is not in the library, he loves watching basketball games and fishing.

Jackson Lee obtained his B.A. in Linguistics and French back in his hometown Hong Kong, at the University of Hong Kong. Before coming to Chicago, he completed an MA in Linguistics at the University of Manchester. Jackson’s research interests lie in phonology and its interaction with other areas of grammar, particularly morphology and phonetics.

Anastasios Chatzikonsantinou is from Greece and finished his B.A. in Linguistics and Greek Philology there, continuing in Essex U.K. with an MA in Computational Linguistics. After working in the industry (Nuance Communications) designing text-to-speech synthesis systems for mobile devices, he completed a mandatory year of military service and then spent time teaching and participating in psycholinguistic experiments.  His research interests include processing and acquisition of negative polarity items, HPSG, and human computer interaction, while non-linguistic interests include swimming and music programming.

Looking forward to hearing more from them and their research in the not-too-far future …