Prof. Dr. Johann-Mattis List holds the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics at the University of Passau since January 2023 and leads the ERC-funded research group 'ProduSemy'. Previously, he served as acting professor at Bielefeld University and senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena). He earned his doctorate at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and completed his habilitation at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Research Focus: Evolution of language lexica, computational methods for language comparison, Southeast Asian and South American languages, open science practices. Key Projects: ERC-funded 'ProduSemy' group studying word family evolution via algorithms. Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative standardizing language data. Media and Outreach: Featured in SWR Wissen, MDR Wissen, and ARD Alpha, discussing language universals and computational methods. His interdisciplinary work bridges linguistics with bioinformatics, emphasizing transparent computational tools for historical language studies. Collaborations span computer science and humanities, advancing methods like phylogenetic analysis and lexical database development. Recent work includes studies on body-part terminology in 1028 languages (Scientific Reports, 2024) and neural network approaches for language affiliation (2025). He mentors students like Frederic Blum, contributing to the next generation of computational linguists.








