1

I am a senior scientist at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and now also a Privatdozent at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and pursue an interdisciplinary research project on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison (CALC), funded by the European Research Council from April 2017 until March 2022. In this project, we will try to develop methods and interfaces that bridge the gap between computational and classical approaches to historical linguistics in order to shed light on the history of the Sino-Tibetan language family. In my research, I generally follow a data-driven, empirical, and quantitative perspective on language change and language history. In contrast to pure computational approaches, however, I try to keep my research closely connected to traditional historical linguistics and theory, following a computer-assisted rather than a computer-based framework of quantitative research in historical linguistics.