Expertise: linguistics, natural language processing, Bayesian modeling

Richard Futrell, language science assistant professor, comes to UC Irvine from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

His work, which examines how variation among languages is explained by efficient communication, has been featured in academic publications including Cognition, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, the Journal of Memory and Language, and others. He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as multiple fellowships and scholarships supporting his language studies.

Futrell received his Ph.D. in cognitive sciences at MIT, and his M.A. and B.A. in linguistics at Stanford University. He spent one year in the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and was an intern on the Siri Advanced Development Group for Apple, Inc.