I am a professor for Germanic Philology at the University of Zurich. After my PhD in Zurich I was a visiting researcher at the linguistic departments of the universities of Stanford and Konstanz. I previously held positions at the universities of Manchester, Freiburg (Germany), and Munich. My research and teaching interests are centered around the structure of historical and present-day German(ic) varieties, in particular nonstandard and contact varieties. A focus in my work is the morphosyntactic structure of Upper German dialects (e.g. Swiss German and Bavarian, but also Amish Shwitzer in Northern Indiana). In the context of the L&M group I am particularly interested in helping to find out what exactly the relevant linguistic properties are in speech produced by subjects with depression. Another area of interest is language structure and use in autism spectrum disorders.