Dept. of Linguistics
University of Potsdam
14476 Potsdam, Germany
Phone: +49-(0)331-977-2950 | Fax: - 2087
Email: vasishth squiggle uni hyphen potsdam dot de
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Biography
I was born and grew up in New Delhi, and did my schooling at
St. Columba's School. Soon after finishing high school, I went into kidney failure; I received a kidney transplant from my father in 1985. The transplant failed in 2011, and I have been on hemodialysis since then.
Before moving to the US and then Germany, we lived in Japan for a total of five years, in Minoo, Osaka prefecture, and Nishinomiya, Hyogo prefecture. At the bottom of the page are some of the visual traces from my life over the years, mostly but not all from our time in Japan.
I used to be a musician (violin and
guitar); I own a superb Hungarian-made concert violin which I don't play any more. Two big interests I have outside of academia are
Iaido, and
Qi Gong+Tai Chi.
Recently, I started playing the guitar again. A recent recording:
Milonga, by Juan Buscaglia.
My BA (Honours) was in Japanese (JNU, India), and I have Masters degrees in Linguistics (JNU, India), Computer and Information Science (Ohio State, USA), and Statistics (Sheffield, UK). I have a PhD in Linguistics (2002) from Ohio State.
Cool fact: My academic geneology (as far as I could reconstruct it) goes all the way back to a German scientist from Berlin:
Richard Lewis (my PhD advisor) ←
Allen Newell ←
Herb Simon ←
Henry Schultz←
Henry Moore ←
Simon Newcomb,
John Bates Clark ←
Benjamin Pierce,
Karl Knies ←
Nathaniel Bowditch,
Bruno Hildebrandt ←
Maxmilian Duncker.
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)