Shota to MIT

Associate Professor of Linguistics.

Congratulations to Shota Momma *16, who in Fall 2026 begins as Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT. Shota will be leaving the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has been Assistant Professor since 2019, following a three-year postdoc at UC San Diego with Vic Ferreira. Shota's  dissertation, Parsing, Generation, and Grammar, was supported an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant (BCS 1530332), under the mentorship of Co-PI's Colin Phillips and Ellen Lau, and defended to a committee that also included Bill Idsardi and Bob Slevc, plus Rochelle Newman representing the Dean. Since Fall 2024 Shota has himself been a mentor to a Terp of more recent vintage, Alex Krauska *24, who is presently with Shota on a two-year postdoctoral research position, following her dissertation, A World without Words, supervised by Ellen Lau.