David Lightfoot, professor of the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. He was elected as President of the Linguistic Society of America, serving 2010-2011. He is General Editor for the Generative Syntax series published by Wiley-Blackwell, and serves on linguistics editorial boards at Cambridge and Oxford University Presses. His researches are in syntactic variation, diachronic change, child language   acquisition, role of linguistics in the brain and cognitive sciences.