#1001
William Tenn
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
William Tenn was the pseudonym of Philip Klass , a British-born American science fiction author, notable for many stories with satirical elements. Biography Born to a Jewish family in London, Phillip Klass moved to New York City with his parents before his second birthday and grew up in Brooklyn, the oldest of three children. After serving in the United States Army during World War II as a combat engineer in Europe, he held a job as a technical editor with an Air Force radar and radio laboratory and was employed by Bell Labs.
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Peter T. Daniels
1951 - Present (73 years)
Peter T. Daniels is a scholar of writing systems, specializing in typology. He was co-editor of the book The World's Writing Systems . He was a lecturer at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Chicago State University.
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André Téchiné
1943 - Present (81 years)
André Téchiné is a French screenwriter and film director. He has a long and distinguished career that places him among the most accomplished post-New Wave French film directors. Téchiné belongs to a second generation of French film critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma who followed François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and others from criticism into filmmaking. He is noted for his elegant and emotionally charged films that often delve into the complexities of emotions and the human condition. One of Téchiné's trademarks is the examination of human relations in a sensitive bu...
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William Witney
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
William Nuelsen Witney was an American film and television director. He is best remembered for the action films he made for Republic Pictures, particularly serials: Dick Tracy Returns, G-Men vs. the Black Dragon, Daredevils of the Red Circle, Zorro's Fighting Legion, and Drums of Fu Manchu. Prolific and pugnacious, Witney began directing while still in his 20s, and continued working until 1982.
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Ron Padgett
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
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Keith Allan
1943 - Present (81 years)
Keith Allan, FAHA is an Australian linguist and Emeritus Professor at Monash University. Allan sees language as a form of social interactive behaviour and believes this to be an important consideration in any thorough account of meaning in natural language. While he is interested in all aspects of meaning in language, his main interests are semantics, pragmatics, linguistic meta-theory and the history and philosophy of linguistics.
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Hans Henrich Hock
1938 - Present (86 years)
Hans Henrich Hock is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Hock holds a PhD in linguistics from Yale University. His research interests include general historical and comparative linguistics, as well as the linguistics of Sanskrit. He currently teaches general historical linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, Sanskrit, diachronic sociolinguistics, pidgins and creoles, and the history of linguistics. He has served on the Undergraduate Program Committee of the Department of Linguistics since 1993.
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Fred Lukoff
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Fred Lukoff was an American linguist who specialized in the study of the Korean language and was the first president of the International Association for Korean Language Education . A student of Zellig Harris, with whom he wrote "The phonemes of Kingwana-Swahili" in 1942, Lukoff received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, his master's from the same institution in 1948, and his doctorate, also from Penn, in 1954. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics the same year as Noam Chomsky to work on machine translation under Vict...
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Alicia Shepard
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alicia Cobb "Lisa" Shepard was an American journalist, media writer and expert on the work and lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In February 2014, she moved to Kabul, Afghanistan to work with Afghan journalists. In fall 2012, she joined the University of Nevada, Las Vegas faculty as a visiting professor for the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs.
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Ravi Shankar
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Ravi Shankar, was an Indian sitarist and composer. A sitar virtuoso, he became the world's best-known expert of North Indian classical music in the second half of the 20th century, and influenced many musicians in India and throughout the world. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999.
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Jonathan Wilson
1976 - Present (48 years)
Jonathan Mark Wilson is a British sports journalist and author who writes for a number of publications, including The Guardian and Sports Illustrated. He is a columnist for World Soccer and Unibet and founder and editor of The Blizzard. He also appears on The Guardians football podcast, Football Weekly".
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Victor Papanek
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Victor Josef Papanek was an Austrian-born American designer and educator, who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. His book Design for the Real World, originally published in 1971 and translated into more than 24 languages, had lasting international impact.
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Abbas Kiarostami
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Abbas Kiarostami was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy , Close-Up , The Wind Will Carry Us , and Taste of Cherry , which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. In later works, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love , he filmed for the first time outside Iran: in Italy and Japan, respectively. His films Where Is the Fri...
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Peter Hall
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Sir Peter Reginald Frederick Hall CBE was an English theatre, opera and film director. His obituary in The Times declared him "the most important figure in British theatre for half a century" and on his death, a Royal National Theatre statement declared that Hall's "influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled". In 2018, the Laurence Olivier Awards, recognizing achievements in London theatre, changed the award for Best Director to the Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director.
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Kim Kashkashian
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kim Kashkashian is an American violist. She has spent her career in the U.S. and Europe and collaborated with many major contemporary composers. In 2013 she won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. She is recognized as one of the world's top violists.
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Saroj Khan
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Saroj Khan was an Indian dance choreographer in Hindi cinema. She was born in Bombay State , India. She was best known for the dance form mujra and the first woman choreographer in Bollywood. With a career spanning over forty years, she choreographed more than 3000 songs. She died on 3 July 2020 of a sudden cardiac arrest.
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Andrzej Wajda
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Andrzej Witold Wajda was a Polish film and theatre director. Recipient of an Honorary Oscar, the Palme d'Or, as well as Honorary Golden Lion and Honorary Golden Bear Awards, he was a prominent member of the "Polish Film School". He was known especially for his trilogy of war films consisting of A Generation , Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds .
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Michael Henry Heim
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
Michael Henry Heim was an American literary translator and scholar. He translated literature from eight languages , including works by Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, and Günter Grass. He received his doctorate in Slavic languages and literature from Harvard in 1971, and joined the faculty of UCLA the following year. In 2003, he and his wife used their life savings to establish the PEN Translation Fund.
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Ian Watson
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ian Watson is a British science fiction writer. He lives in Gijón, Spain. Life In 1959, Watson worked as an accounts clerk at Runciman's, a Newcastle shipping company. The experience was not particularly satisfying.
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David Robie
1945 - Present (79 years)
David Robie is a New Zealand author, journalist and media educator who has covered the Asia-Pacific region for international media for more than two decades. Robie is the author of several books on South Pacific media and politics and is an advocate for media freedom in the pacific region.
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Christiane Nord
1943 - Present (81 years)
Christiane Nord is a German translation scholar. Biography She studied translation at Heidelberg University ; in 1983 she obtained her PhD in Romance Studies, with habilitation in applied translation studies and translation pedagogy. From 1967 she has been involved in translator training at the universities of Heidelberg, Vienna, Hildesheim, Innsbruck and Magdeburg .
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Connie Willis
1945 - Present (79 years)
Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis , commonly known as Connie Willis, is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for particular works—more major SF awards than any other writer—most recently the "Best Novel" Hugo and Nebula Awards for Blackout/All Clear . She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011.
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Peter Doig
1959 - Present (65 years)
Peter Doig is a Scottish painter. He has settled in Trinidad since 2002. In 2007, his painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist. In February 2013, his painting, The Architect's Home in the Ravine, sold for $12 million at a London auction. Art critic Jonathan Jones said about him: "Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity."
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Hans Werner Henze
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Hans Werner Henze was a German composer. His large oeuvre is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition. In particular, his stage works reflect "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life".
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David Brown
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
David Brown was an American film and theatre producer and writer who was best known for producing the 1975 film Jaws based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley. Early life He was born in New York City, the son of Lillian and Col. Edward Fisher Brown, and was the elder brother of Carolyn Brown, who married French aristocrat Emmanuel de Crussol d'Uzès, Duke of Uzès, then who remarried to Geoffrey Carpenter Doyle, a grandson of New York City architect James Edwin Ruthven Carpenter Jr.
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Ang Lee
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ang Lee is a Taiwanese filmmaker. Born in Pingtung County of southern Taiwan, Lee was educated in Taiwan and later in the United States. As a filmmaker Lee's work is known for its emotional charge and exploration of repressed, hidden emotions. During his career, he has received international critical and popular acclaim and numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. In 2003, Lee was ranked 27th in The Guardian 40 best directors.
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Daniel Barenboim
1942 - Present (82 years)
Daniel Barenboim is an Argentine-born classical pianist and conductor based in Berlin. From 1992 until January 2023, Barenboim was the general music director of the Berlin State Opera and "Staatskapellmeister" of its orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin.
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Peter Martins
1946 - Present (78 years)
Peter Martins is a Danish ballet dancer and choreographer. Martins was a principal dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet and with the New York City Ballet, where he joined George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and John Taras as balletmaster in 1981. He retired from dancing in 1983, having achieved the rank of danseur noble, becoming Co-Ballet Master-In-Chief with Robbins. From 1990 until January 2018, he was solely responsible for artistic leadership of City Ballet.
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Dana Priest
1957 - Present (67 years)
Dana Louise Priest is an American journalist, writer and teacher. She has worked for nearly 30 years for the Washington Post and became the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014. Before becoming a full-time investigative reporter at the Post, Priest specialized in intelligence reporting and wrote many articles on the U.S. "War on terror" and was the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting citing "her persistent, painstaking reports on se...
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Jim Steinman
1947 - 2021 (74 years)
James Richard Steinman was an American composer, lyricist and record producer. He also worked as an arranger, pianist, and singer. His work included songs in the adult contemporary, rock, dance, pop, musical theater, and film score genres. He wrote songs for Bonnie Tyler and Meat Loaf, including Bat Out of Hell , and also wrote and produced Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell and Tyler's Faster Than the Speed of Night.
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Francis Andersen
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Francis Ian Andersen was an Australian scholar in the fields of biblical studies and Hebrew. Together with A. Dean Forbes , he pioneered the use of computers for the analysis of biblical Hebrew syntax. He taught Old Testament, History, and Religious Studies at various institutions in Australia and the United States, including Macquarie University, the University of Queensland, and Fuller Theological Seminary. His published works include the Tyndale commentary on Job, and Anchor Bible commentaries on Hosea, Amos, Habakkuk and Micah, and over 90 papers .
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Abolhassan Najafi
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Abolhassan Najafi was an Iranian writer and translator. Najafi was born in Najaf, Iraq, into a family from Isfahan. He began his literary activities in the 1960s and translated several books from French into Persian. He co-published a successful literary periodical entitled Jong-e Isfahan . After the Iranian revolution, he published a controversial book on Persian usage entitled Let's Avoid Mistakes .
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Svetlana Geier
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Svetlana Geier, born Svetlana Michailovna Ivanova, was a literary translator who translated from her native Russian into German. She lived in Germany from 1943 until her death in 2010. Biography Svetlana Geier was born in Kiev in 1923, the daughter of Russian parents. Her father was a scientist with a specialty in plant breeding. Her mother came from a family of Tsarist officers. Her father was arrested in 1938 during the period of Stalin's Great Purge, and died in 1939 from illnesses stemming from his time in prison. Geier had a sheltered childhood, receiving private tuition in both France and Germany early in her life.
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Karl-Gottfried Prasse
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Karl-Gottfried Prasse was a Danish linguist with a focus in the Berber language. He was mainly concerned with the Tuareg-Berber language spoken in Niger, Mali and southern Algeria. For this language, he has authored dictionaries and complete grammar descriptions.
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Paul Gray
1958 - Present (66 years)
Paul Murray Granville Gray is an English bassist notable for playing with the rock bands Eddie and the Hot Rods and The Damned. Biography Paul Gray was born in Leigh-on-Sea. Inspired by a Hawkwind gig he attended, Gray started learning bass guitar at the age of 13, his playing influenced by bassists such as Steve Currie, Lemmy, John Entwistle, Felix Pappalardi and Roger Glover. He joined Eddie and the Hot Rods as bassist after answering an advert in the Southend Evening Echo. The band had several hit singles and albums in the late 1970s, including "Do Anything You Wanna Do". While working wit...
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Helmut Rix
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Helmut Rix was a German linguist and professor of the Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany. He is best known for his research into Indo-European and Etruscan languages, as well as for being the author of the hypothesis of Tyrrhenian languages.
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Debbie Millman
1962 - Present (62 years)
Debbie Millman is an American writer, educator, artist, curator, and designer who is best known as the host of the podcast Design Matters. She has authored six books and is the President Emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and chair, one of only five women to hold the position over 100 years. She co-founded the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City with Steven Heller. She was previously the editorial and creative director of Print magazine. Her illustrations have appeared in many major publications, including New York Magazine, Design Observe...
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Chris Marker
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée , A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil . Marker is usually associated with the Left Bank subset of the French New Wave that occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s, and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy.
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Antoine Sfeir
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Antoine Sfeir was a Franco-Lebanese journalist. Biography Sfeir was the editor of the French journal Les Cahiers de l'Orient , a quarterly publication devoted to the Arab and Muslim world, and the president of the CERPO . A former professor of international relations at the CELSA school, he was also president of the ILERI international relations school .
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Richard Curtis
1956 - Present (68 years)
Richard Whalley Anthony Curtis is a British screenwriter, producer and film director. One of Britain's most successful comedy screenwriters, he is known primarily for romantic comedy films, among them Four Weddings and a Funeral , Notting Hill , Bridget Jones's Diary , Love Actually , Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason , About Time , and Yesterday . He is also known for the drama War Horse and for having co-written the sitcoms Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley. His early career saw him write material for the BBC's Not the Nine O'Clock News and ITV's Spitting Image.
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Jean Delannoy
1908 - 2008 (100 years)
Jean Delannoy was a French actor, film editor, screenwriter and film director. Biography Although Delannoy was born in a Paris suburb, his family was from Haute-Normandie in the north of France. He was a Protestant, a descendant of Huguenots, some of whom fled the country during the French Wars of Religion, and settled first in Wallonia. Afterwards, their name became De la Noye and then Delano, who were on the second ship to immigrate to Plymouth, Massachusetts.
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René Étiemble
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
René Ernest Joseph Eugène Étiemble was a French essayist, scholar, novelist, and promoter of Middle Eastern and Asiann cultures. Known commonly by his family name alone, Etiemble held the coveted Chair of Comparative Literature, in 1955, at the Institute of General and Comparative Literature in the pre-1968 Sorbonne University and continued in his post as a tenured Professor at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University from 1956 to 1978. His doctoral dissertation on the Myth of Rimbaud and his many interpreters world-wide won him fame in 1952. However, one critic thinks Étiemble's derisive tone and some ill-founded conjectures about Rimbaud's later life undermine the book's credibility today.
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Daphne Caruana Galizia
1964 - 2017 (53 years)
Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta and was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers, and subsequent assassination by car bomb. In particular, she focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, and allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and in...
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Blake Edwards
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Blake Edwards was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Edwards began his career in the 1940s as an actor, but he soon began writing screenplays and radio scripts before turning to producing and directing in television and films. His best-known films include Breakfast at Tiffany's , Days of Wine and Roses , A Shot in the Dark , The Great Race , 10 , Victor/Victoria , Blind Date , and the hugely successful Pink Panther film series with British actor Peter Sellers. Often thought of as primarily a director of comedies, he also directed several drama, musical, and detective films.
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Marc Fisher
1958 - Present (66 years)
Marc Fisher is a senior editor for The Washington Post, where he writes about national, foreign and local issues. He was previously a Post enterprise editor, leading a team of writers experimenting with new types of storytelling. Fisher wrote a local column for the Post and another about radio, music and culture titled "The Listener."
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John Jakes
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
John William Jakes was an American writer, best known for historical and speculative fiction. His American Civil War trilogy, North and South, has sold millions of copies worldwide. He was also the author of The Kent Family Chronicles. Jakes used the pen name Jay Scotland among others.
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Mikis Theodorakis
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Michail "Mikis" Theodorakis was a Greek composer and lyricist credited with over 1,000 works. He scored for the films Zorba the Greek , Z , and Serpico . He was a three-time BAFTA nominee, winning for Z. For the score in the movie Serpico , he earned Grammy nominations. Furthermore, for the unforgettable score to Zorba the Greek , with its 'Zorba's Dance', he was Golden Globe nominated.
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Joaquim Maria Puyal
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joaquim Maria Puyal i Ortiga is a Catalan journalist known for his work in television and radio. Biography He was born on March 24, 1949, in the city of Barcelona. He graduated in romance philology at the Universitat de Barcelona and later obtained a degree in Communication Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2010 he earned a Ph.D. degree in Linguistics by the Universitat de Barcelona, defending an Extraordinary Awarded thesis.
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Howard Lasnik
1945 - Present (79 years)
Howard Lasnik is a distinguished university professor in the department of linguistics at the University of Maryland. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology , Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut in 1972, and took up his present post at the University of Maryland in 2002.
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