I was born in Cologne, Germany, and studied mainly in Freiburg i. Br. After an MA in London in 1994 I finished my PhD in Bern in 1996, with funding from the Deutsche Studienstiftung. The Swiss government then funded two postdocs (1996-99), one at the Institute of Computational Linguistics in Stuttgart (with Hans Kamp) and another at Columbia University and New York University (with Isaac Levi and Kit Fine, respectively). I obtained my first regular position as assistant professor in Regensburg, Bavaria, and moved to Amsterdam as 'UD' in 2003. I became a professor at Durham University in 2006, and was a Head of Department there from 2007-2010. Since 2013 I am a research professor at the Catalan Institute of Advanced Studies, based in the Language Sciences department at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and the neuroimaging research group of FIDMAG Germanes Hospitalàries Research Foundation, Barcelona. I founded the Grac-Lab dedicated to the comparative study of language disorders in 2013.