New Chair

Jeff Lidz takes the helm.

Congratulations to Jeff Lidz, who on July 1 became Chair of our department. Jeff arrived at Maryland in 2005 as Associate Professor, following five years as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern (where in 1990 he had earned a BS in Journalism), three years with Lila Gleitman as a postdoc at the University of Pennslvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (1990-2016), and five earning an MA and PhD in Linguistics at the University of Delaware supervised by Peter Cole. Then after ten years as a Terrapin, Jeff was named Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, having "combine[d] outstanding scholarly accomplishment with excellence in teaching and personif[ied] our image of the professoriate," a legacy that continues after his supervising more than two dozen PhD students; co-authoring work with Alexander, Bill, Colin, Ellen, Howard, Masha, Naomi, Paul, Philip, Tonia and Valentine; serving for seven years as Editor of Language Acquisition; and practicing mandolin in his office. Jeff describes himself as studying syntax and meaning in human language, via their acquisition, representation and processing. In his time at Maryland he has been Principal or Co-Principal investigator on NSF grants covering the acquisition of quantifier scope, non-local syntactic dependencies, the semantics and pragmatics of attitude verbs, and the use of transitivity to bootstrap verb meanings, as well as a half dozen NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grants with his students, and the 2008 IGERT grant that galvanized the greater language science community at UMD. Now after almost twenty years here, he takes this new leadership position, becoming yet another notable product of Rockville Centre, New York, alongside Howard Stern, Dave Attell and Amy Schumer. Good luck Jeff!