Gerhard Jäger

Prof. Gerhard Jäger holds the Chair of General Linguistics at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Tübingen. He serves as a Principal Investigator (PI) in the Clusters of Excellence Human Origins and Machine Learning for Science, and leads projects like Phylomilia (funded by Volkswagen Foundation) and CrossLingference (ERC Advanced Grant). His career spans multiple institutions, including Bielefeld University (2004-2009) and Stanford University (visiting scholar, 2004).

• Habilitation (2002) at Humboldt University Berlin with thesis on Anaphora and Type Logical Grammar
• PhD (1996) at Humboldt University Berlin on Dynamic Semantics

His research bridges computational linguistics, phylogenetic analysis, and game theory, focusing on Bayesian models, language evolution, and cross-linguistic typology. Recent work explores phylogenetic inference from acoustic speech data and geographic influences on language trees.

Key contributions include 15+ recent publications on topics spanning phylogenetic typology, cognate detection, and Bayesian language modeling. These works employ machine learning, statistical inference, and evolutionary game theory to analyze language change, typological variation, and linguistic stability.

Honors include ERC Advanced Grant, Volkswagen Foundation funding, and DFG-Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies participation. He has taught courses in Computational Historical Linguistics, Phylogenetic Methods, and Bayesian Data Analysis across institutions like Tübingen, Bielefeld, and Stanford.

He actively contributes to academic communities through workshop organization (e.g., Quantitative Theoretical Linguistics, Game Theory in Pragmatics) and serves on the faculty council at Tübingen. His team collaborates with institutions like Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and LMU Munich.