Professor of Linguistic Spike Gildea is a fourth-generation immigrant to Oregon, born in Salem and raised in the McKenzie Valley. He got all of his degrees at the UO: his BA in English Literature (1983), then after two years in the Peace Corps teaching English in Nepal, his MA in Linguistics with a specialization in language teaching (1989), then his PhD in linguistics studying historical changes in the grammar of the Cariban language family. He worked 2 years as a visiting researcher at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, Brazil, was a professor of Linguistics at Rice University, and then came back home to the UO in 2000 as a professor of Linguistics.  Spike’s academic research focuses on the description and comparison of Indigenous languages of South America. In recent years, he has begun working on a literacy project in Brazil with bilingual educators, and with NILI colleagues and students to help better document and analyze languages of the Pacific Northwest.