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- Learning to program
- High school and university
- Software industry
- PhD
- Academic career
- Research summary
- Publications, talks & software (outputs)
I was born in 1974 in Romania and I grew up in Milcovul, a village about 10 km south-east of Focșani. Both my parents were teachers: my father – mathematics and my mother – biology.
Learning to program
In 1986 I learned to program in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum Romanian clone (HC-85), and around 1987 I learned assembler for the Z80 microprocessor, followed by Pascal, LISP, Prolog, Ada, Modula-2, ALGOL, Forth and bits of Fortran. In 1989, just months before the Romanian Revolution, I discovered Kernighan & Ritchie’s The C Programming Language and since then most of my programming was in C and C++, until I switched to academia and started my love/hate relationship with R (that was back in 2005 when R was still geeky and there was no RStudio).
High school and university
In my secondary and high school years I participated in various National Contests, especially Physics (1989) and Computer Science (1990 to 1993). Between 1993 and 1997 I studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Bucharest, graduating (1997) with a thesis on Artificial Life and Genetic Algorithms. In 1996 I “discovered” Evolutionary Biology through a Christmas Holidays reading of Dawkins’ River Out of Eden. Also in 1996 I started a second degree in Psychology (interrupted before graduating) at the Faculty of Psychology, Pedagogy and Sociology, University of Bucharest, and in 1997 I became interested in psychiatry and projective psychological tests (such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Szondi Drives Test).
Between 2000 and 2001 I did my MSc in Neurobiology and Behavior, Faculty of Biology, University of Bucharest with Dr. Carmen Strungaru as my supervisor, graduating (2001) with a dissertation on human evolution and language origins. In spring 2001 I was a Socrates/Erasmus exchange student at the (former) Max Planck Institute for Human Ethology in Andechs, working with Prof. Dr. Wulf Schiefenhövel.
Software industry
In parallel (1997 – 2004) with all this, I was a professional in the software industry, working for Softwin, one of the biggest Romanian software companies at the time (with stages at clients in France and Finland), as programmer, software engineer, project manager, and finally as technical leader, in various projects (including parsing, content protection and e-Learning for schools) and involving multiple technologies (such as C/C++, SGML/XML, user interfaces, low-level network protocols and DRM), mostly on MS Windows.
During these years I also met my wife, Alexandra Dima, who is a Health Psychology researcher and an accomplished painter.
PhD in Edinburgh
Then in January 2004 I changed track and started my PhD in Language Evolution with the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, Linguistics and English Language, The University of Edinburgh with Dr. Simon Kirby and Prof. Jim Hurford as supervisors, and since 2005 I worked mostly with Prof. D. Robert Ladd. At the end of 2006 I submitted my thesis on links between genetic and linguistic diversities, and in February 2007 I passed my viva (with no corrections), having Prof. April McMahon and Dr. Daniel Nettle as examiners.
Academic career
Following a one-year (July 2007 – June 2008) ESRC (UK) Postdoctoral Fellowship, also at the University of Edinburgh, with Prof. D. Robert Ladd as mentor, I moved in July 2008 to the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. There I was researcher in the Neurobiology of Language department (2008 – 2012) and senior researcher in the Language and Genetics department (2012 – 2017), but I collaborated with several other departments (particularly with Language and Cognition and Evolutionary processes in language and culture) and in particular with Prof. Stephen C. Levinson. In October 2012 I became Principal Investigator in my own research group (Genetic biases in Language and Speech or G[ɜ]bils) funded by a five-year NWO Vidi grant (until September 2017) and hosted by the Language and Genetics department. Scott Moisik (postdoc) and Rick Janssen (PhD student) were core members of the group, while Carly Jaques, Grazia Di Pisa and Janna Schulze were research assistants, and we also collaborated with several institutions (including the Donders Institute, the Radboud UMC, the Archaeology Department at Leiden University, the Cognomics Project and the Dutch Twin Registry).
In 2015 I became an affiliated Research Fellow of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and in February 2016 I was Visiting Professor with the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics International Chair at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 in Pairs, France.
Since January 2015 I am, together with Bart de Boer, the Executive Editor of the Journal of Language Evolution (published by Oxford University Press), and in spring 2015 my book An Introduction to Genetics for Language Scientists (published by Cambridge University Press and with a cover painted by Alexandra Dima) appeared. Since 2019 I a member of the Editorial Board of Linguistic Typology (published by De Gruyter).
In 2017 I became Dutch, and in October I started a 10-months EURIAS Fellowship with the Collegium de Lyon, collaborating mainly with the CNRS lab Dynamique Du Langage (DDL), in Lyon, France.
Between October 2018 and September 2021, I was an IDEXLyon Fellow with the Université Lumière Lyon 2, hosted by the Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (DDL), leading a project funded by IDEXLyon named “Variation, Change and Complexity in Linguistic and Health-related Behaviours” (V2C) with two main components. One component (hosted by Université Lumière Lyon 2/DDL) concerned language (in particular, the non-linguistic causes of linguistic diversity, complexity and robustness) and the other (led by Dr. Alexandra Dima and hosted by Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1/HESPER) concerned healthcare (in particular, the identification of adherence and patient trajectories from healthcare data and the design of interactive tools for clinical decision making). The “language” component also comprised two PhD students, Rémi Anselme and Natalja Ulrich, and one Postdoc, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, a bit later joined by a third, independently funded PhD student, Mathilde Josserand.
In 2021 I obtained an Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in the Language Sciences from Université Lumière Lyon 2, allowing me to independently supervise PhD students and to be considered for professorship positions in France.
Since October 2021 I am an ICREA Research Professor with the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, University of Barcelona, Spain.
Research summary
At the most general level, my work concerns what makes us human and how we evolved to be the way we are, and in particular the origins, evolution and properties of language. While my research concerns mainly linguistics and the language sciences, it also touches on other disciplines including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, biology, anthropology, computer science and statistics. For more details please see here.
Publications, talks & software
For publications, please see my Google Scholar profile.
For selected presentations, talks and teaching, please see here (some with slides).
I also develop free and open source software and databases (see my GitHub repository):
- AdhereR: R package for computing and plotting the adherence to treatment from electronic medical records; R code released under GPLv3 and the package can be directly installed from CRAN; described in the paper:
- GenLangCorrV4: software platform for running simulations of genetically biased language change and evolution; C++ under GPLv3; described and used in:
- BayesLang: Bayesian phylogeny inference designed for typological linguistic data with multi-threaded Metropolis-Coupled Markov Chain Monte Carlo; C++ under GPLv3; described in:
- Features and counts from Phoible and Ruhlen’s databases: two feature systems to define and count abstract classes of speech sounds across languages; data and R code under various licenses; described in:
- Language family classifications as Newick trees: classifications of languages into language families from several databases (Ethnologue, Glottolog, WALS and AUTOTYP) converted to the standard Newick format with added branch length information; data and R code under various licenses; described in:
Dediu, D. (in press). Making Genealogical Language Classifications Available for Phylogenetic Analysis: Newick Trees, Unified Identifiers, and Branch Length. Language Dynamics and Change.
