The department mourns the loss of alumnus Akira Omaki, who passed away on August 6th 2018, following complications from lymphoma.
Akira earned his PhD from Maryland in 2010, with a
dissertation that integrated research on child language acquisition, adult sentence processing, and syntactic theory. After a postdoc in Geneva with
Julie Franck, Akira joined the faculty of the
Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University. Then in 2016 he took up a position in the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington. All the while Akira maintained strong friendships and work relations with his former classmates and teachers.
He leaves behind his wife Elise, and their two-year old daughter Aya.
A fuller remembrance of Akira, written by Colin Phillips and UW department chair Richard Wright, is
here.
