Terpromotions in The 6ix

Congratulations to Phil, Ewan and Dave.

2026ix is a great year for our PhD alumni at the University of Toronto, three of whom were promoted this year. 2009's Phil Monahan has been promoted to Full Professor, while 2013 classmates Ewan Dunbar and Dave Kush are now both tenured as Associate Professors. Big congratulations to all three!

Phil wrote his dissertation, On The Way To Linguistic Representation: Neuromagnetic Evidence of Early Auditory Abstraction in the Perception of Speech and Pitch, under the supervision of Bill Idsardi and David Poeppel. After graduating in 2009, in the same class as Ellen Lau, Phil then took a postdoctoral research position at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, and in 2013 joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto as Assistant Professor. He was tenured as Associate Professor there in 2020, and is now Full. 

The year Phil was tenured, 2020, was also the year both Ewan and Dave arrived in Toronto as Assistant Professors.

Ewan's arrival was a return: he had earned his MA and BA from there twelve and thirteen years before. Prior to the return he was in Paris, first as a postdoctoral researcher in the ENS's Laboratory for Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics, then as Assistant Professor at the Paris Diderot University (aka Paris 7). At UMD he wrote his dissertation, Statistical Knowledge and Learning in Phonology, with Naomi Feldman and Bill Idsardi.

Dave wrote his dissertation, Respecting Relations, with advisors Colin Phillips and Jeffrey Lidz, plus Norbert Hornstein unofficially. He had arrived at Maryland six years earlier, in the Fall of 2007, as a Baggett Fellow, together with Elika Bergelson. During that year Dave worked on four very different projects: apparent Island Violations in Swedish with Norbert Hornstein and Akira Omaki; online c-command computation with Colin Phillips, Jeff Lidz, Akira Omaki *10, Brian Dillon *11, and Pedro Alcocer;  processing generics with Shannon Hoerner, David Poeppel, and Sandeep Prasada; and Hindi modality with Valentine Hacquard. He then continued as a PhD student, and left five years later, PhD in hand, for a a postdoctoral research position with Julie A. Van Dyke at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. In 2016 he moved to the Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet in Trondheim, Norway, where he  held a tenured position alongside 2012 alum Terje Lohndal. Four years later he made like Leif Erikson and alighted in Canada.

It has been a remarkable journey for these alums, of whom we are very proud. Long Live Terpronto!