I’m a linguist interested in how languages differ from one another, or more specifically, in the extent to which they display differences in their grammatical system. I mostly focus on languages and language varieties that are very closely related to one another, both geographically and genealogically. This high degree of relatedness makes it challenging—and therefore interesting—to distinguish variation that is due to the grammatical system from other sources of variation. In recent years I’ve been working on a way of combining formal-theoretical and quantitative-statistical methods into a single analysis of these variation data. When I’m not doing linguistics, chances are I’m taking photographs, running, or reading.