After studying psychology at the University of Utrecht I spent fifteen years under the auspices of SIL in Papua New Guinea. I obtained a PhD in linguistics from the University of Amsterdam with a description of the Papuan language Usan as my dissertation. Following my affiliation with SIL, I spent more than fifteen years at Leiden University, mostly doing research on the languages of the Bird’s Head of Papua, Indonesia. Since 2002 I have been affiliated with the Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute, focussing on isolated languages of the Bird’s Head and New Britain, as well as on historical signals of phylogeny and contact in Papuan and Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area.