Dr. Daniel Erker (Boston University) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Boston University. He received his PhD in Linguistics from New York University in 2012. His research interests include language variation, contact, and change, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, Spanish in the United States, the languages of Latin America, and the evolution of human language. Dr. Erker is the principal investigator on the federally funded Corpus Based Sociolinguistic Study of Language and Dialect Contact in the Spanish of the Metro Boston Area, which aims to describe and understand how Spanish is used in the Greater Boston Area.