I am a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and cooperating graduate faculty in the Department of Second Language Studies, and affiliate faculty in the Center for Pacific Island Studies. I'm primarily a documentary linguist specializing endangered language preservation. I consider language to be a human behavioral phenomenon to be studied in the context of discourse and society, and I see grammatical structure as a product of the cultural and linguistic practices of the members of a speech community.

I am also dedicated to supporting a technological infrastructure for field linguistics that promotes long-term data sustainability and interoperability, and in my fieldwork I try to bridge the gap between linguistics, archiving, technology and community language activism. To this end, I'm the director of Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai‘i Digital Language Archive.

In recent years my work on language data preservation has turned toward the field of linguistics more broadly, with the aim of increasing the culture of reproducible research in the language sciences. 

orcid.org/0000-0001-8782-515X