Wesley is honored to have been selected as a Raymund Fellow. He is a first-year Ph.D. student in the linguistics program, and he plans to focus on documenting languages of New Guinea.

He is excited to contribute to the growing body of literature about this area, which remains one of the most diverse yet poorly understood linguistic areas in the world.

Wesley attended the University of Chicago, where he received B.A. degrees in both linguistics and economics.

He received a summer grant to study Turkish in Istanbul, an experience he really enjoyed, and he completed his linguistics thesis about verbs in the Georgian language.

He also worked in the Language Processing Lab as a research assistant, where he got to put electrodes on people's heads to measure their brain activity as they completed language-related tasks.

Wesley also started a constructed languages club, where he and other language nerds learned about various linguistic concepts by creating their own languages and had fun experimenting with language games.

Wesley hopes to continue pursuing his love of studying languages and how they work.

The University of Oregon is known as a great program for language documentation, and the presence of such a strong linguistics faculty assures him that he will be in good hands during his journey to learn as much as he can about languages and grow into a prolific researcher himself.