Following the first meeting last month of our Challenge Panel, we are pleased to introduce the esteemed members, in their own words. First up: Stefan Gries.

I am currently a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as well as Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen (since September 2011). I was very happy to be offered the possibility to be involved with the new Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University (since July 2013).

Methodologically, I do quantitative corpus linguistics at the intersection of corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and computational linguistics, using a variety of different statistical methods to investigate linguistic topics such as morpho-phonology, syntax, the syntax-lexis interface, and semantics, and corpus-linguistic methodology, as well as first and second/foreign language acquisition. Occasionally, I do experimental work and much of my work involves the open source programming language R. Theoretically, I am a cognitively-/psycholinguistically-oriented usage-based linguist.

I wrote three books and co-edited six. I am publishing relatively widely in corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and quantitative linguistics. I am founding editor-in-chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, associate editor of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistic Studies, and I perform editorial functions for various other international peer-reviewed journals.

My interest in CASS is mostly in seeing how corpus methods and in particular quantitative corpus methods can be applied in a wider variety of social science settings; hopefully, this will include applications in psychology, sociology, and communication studies.