MATT TUCKER DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Matt Tucker successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Thursday June 6th before a committee consisting of Sandy Chung, Jorge Hankamer and Jim McCloskey. Matt’s dissertation is on the syntax of Maltese and the department was honored to welcome representatives of the Maltese community in the Bay Area to the dissertation defense, including the Honorable Louis J. Vella, who is Honorary Consul General of Malta in San Francisco for Northern California and the States of Nevada, Oregon and Hawaii.

Matt has also now accepted an appointment as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at NYU: Abu Dhabi. Matt will be working directly with Diogo Almeida as a part of the NYU Neuroscience of Language team, which includes Alec Marantz, Liina Pylkkanen and David Poeppel. The Abu Dhabi group focuses on ways to leverage the rich linguistic environment of the United Arab Emirates to study questions about linguistic knowledge and language processing, with a particular focus on the linguistics of the Semitic languages.