Eric studied both physics and linguistics as an undergraduate at the U of A and went on to graduate study in linguistics at UCLA. Since completing a PhD in Linguistics in 2005, he has worked in southern China and Southeast Asia in community-based Applied Linguistics for SIL, an international language development NGO. This work included cooperative projects with government agencies, minority language community members, and curriculum development and teaching in a joint Masters program in Kunming. Eric is now teaching in the Masters in Human Language Technology program in the Department of Linguistics, helping students gain the skills to use computational tools for applications within natural language. Although many current natural language tools have been developed for high-resource languages like English, Eric's passion is to see these computational tools developed for language communities without huge existing datasets.