I am currently ICREA (the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) Research Professor with the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, University of Barcelona, Spain, Executive Editor of the Journal of Language Evolution (since 2015), and Member of the Editorial Board of Linguistic Typology (since 2018). Previously, I was IDEX Fellow with Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (DDL)/Université Lumière Lyon 2 in Lyon, France (2018—2021), EURIAS fellow with the Collegium de Lyon, France (2017—2018), Senior Researcher (2012—2017), NWO VIDI group leader (2012—2017) and Researcher (2008—2012) with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and ESRC (UK) Postdoctoral Fellow (2007—2008) with the University of Edinburgh, UK. I hold an HDR (“Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches“, 2021) in Language Sciences from Université Lumière Lyon 2 in Lyon, France, a PhD in Linguistics (2004—2006) from the University of Edinburgh, UK, an MSc in Neurobiology and Behaviour (2000—2002) and a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science (1993—1997) from the University of Bucharest, Romania, where I also studied Psychology (1996—1998). Between 1997 and 2004 I worked in the software industry as software developer, project manager and technical leader. For details please see here.

At the most general level, my research concerns what makes us human and how we evolved to be the way we are, and in particular the origins, evolution and properties of language. I study the complex relationships between language and genes at several scales, from the molecular, developmental, anatomical and physiological, through inter-individual variation, and up to inter-population and evolutionary levels. I use a variety of methods, especially advanced statistical analyses of large databases, computer simulations, phylogenetic approaches and experiments to probe the genetic bases of language and speech, and their interaction with cultural and evolutionary processes. A second major theme in my research concerns the analysis and visualization of data from electronic medical records (especially patterns of adherence to medication). My work is intrinsically inter-disciplinary, drawing on the language sciences, psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, genetics, epidemiology, evolutionary biology, mathematics, statistics and computer science. For details concerning my research please see here, and for publications, talks, teaching and software, please see here.

My twitter account is @Dan_Dediu, and here are links to my profiles on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, ORCID, ICREA, Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, EURIAS, GitHub, and LinkedIn.