Past Members

Zhipeng (Nick) Huang

Membership: 2010-2011 (founding member)

Nick Huang graduated from Yale in 2011 with a B.A. in linguistics and now studies linguistics as a graduate student at the University of Maryland. From sunny Singapore, he has had experience with non-standard varieties of English, albeit of the Southeast Asian kind.

Zachary Maher

Membership: 2010-2013 (founding member)

Zach Maher graduated from Yale in 2013 with a B.A. and M.A. in linguistics.

Sabina Matyiku

Membership: 2010-2017 (founding member)

Sabina Matyiku graduated from Yale with a PhD in linguistics in 2017, having previously received an MA in Linguistics in 2011 and an MPhil in Linguistics in 2013, both also from Yale. Her grammatical diversity research focused on negative inversion in varieties of North American English, particularly in West Texas English.

Phoebe Gaston

Membership: 2011-2013

Phoebe Gaston graduated from Yale in 2013 with a B.A. in linguistics and now studies linguistics as a graduate student at the University of Maryland. Her interests lie in Syntax and Neurolinguistics.

Katie Ruffing

Membership: 2011-2013

Katie Ruffing graduated from Yale in 2013 with a B.A. in linguistics and a B.A. in English.

Dennis Storoshenko

Membership: 2012-2013

Dennis Storoshenko formerly worked as a lecturer and postdoc at Yale. He is now an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Calgary. His research is primarily on theoretical syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, with a focus on binding and anaphora. While at Yale, he worked on projects involving the non-canonical use of reflexive pronouns, and the use of variant reflexive forms such as hisself and theirselves in North America. He also worked on developing practices for using Twitter as a tool in remote fieldwork; as geotagging becomes more common, Twitter can become an easy tool for identifying dialect features in a specific area.

Aidan Kaplan

Membership: 2014-2017

Aidan Kaplan graduated from Yale in 2017 with a B.A. in Linguistics. During his undergraduate career, he was an active member of the Yale Undergraduate Linguistics Society (YULS), and he helped organize the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) contest site at Yale.

Matthew Barros

Membership: 2015-2018

Matthew Barros spent three years at Yale, first as a postdoc and then as a lecturer. His research interests are in syntax and its interfaces with semantics and pragmatics. He is interested in syntactic variation in ellipsis constructions and copular clauses.

Richard (Tom) McCoy

Membership: 2015-2017

Tom McCoy graduated from Yale in 2017 with a B.A. in Linguistics. During his undergraduate career, he spent several summers developing computational tools for low-resource languages, and he served as an organizer and problem writer for the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO).

Katie Martin

Membership: 2016-2018

Katie Martin graduated from Yale in 2018 with a B.A. in Linguistics. After graduation, she is spending a summer working for the YGDP. She will soon be studying linguistics at the University of British Columbia. 

Peter Staub

Membership: 2016

Peter Staub graduated from Pomona College in 2018, with a degree in linguistics and cognitive science. He spent the summer of 2016 at Yale researching the constructions fixin’ to and finna.

Jason Zentz

Membership: 2016-2018

Jason Zentz received his PhD from Yale in May 2016, having studied the morphosyntax of wh-questions, clefts, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses in Bantu languages during grad school. After graduation, he worked for the YGDP as postdoc, funded in part by the NSF grant “The Microsyntax of Pronouns in North American English.” He is now Assistant Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Kaija Gahm

Membership: 2018-2021

Kaija is studying Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (Class of 2020). She has taken a few linguistics classes and loves learning about language. Currently, she is working with the YGDP to clean and manage survey data for future analysis and inclusion in a database.

Kento Tanaka

Membership: 2018-2020

Kento is a senior at Yale studying Linguistics and East Asian Studies. He is currently working on the “try get” construction in Hawai’i English.

Ziyan (Heidi) Lei

Membership: 2018-2020

Heidi Lei is a high school senior at Choate Rosemary Hall. She is an International Linguistics Olympiad medalist. The construction she has been working on recently is get my X on.

Oliver Shoulson

Membership: 2020

Oliver graduated in 2020 with a B.A. in Linguistics. His interests include synchronic/diachronic syntax, microvariation and linguistic typology. He is currently involved in all manner of things pertaining to YGDP including researching new topics, updating bibliographies and entries, and fine tuning the website.