An undergraduate German major at Cornell, David Rood received his PhD in Linguistics from Berkeley in 1969. He has been a faculty member at ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ since 1967, teaching at the University of Cologne, Germany, 1998-1999. He was managing editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics (U. Chicago Press) for over 20 years. His primary research is the documentation of two endangered Native American languages, Wichita (Caddoan family, now spoken by just one person in Oklahoma) and Lakota (Siouan family, popularly called Sioux, spoken by several thousand people in the Dakotas and Canada). He is also interested in second language teaching and has authored or co-authored textbooks or sets of lessons for both these languages. His primary theoretical interest in linguistics is syntax and morphology, especially in polysynthetic Wichita, which he claims has "syntactic morphology", i.e. Wichita speakers create words the same way English speakers create sentences, and some word-internal components can be referential. He also applies some kinds of phonological theory to problems in those two languages. Additional scholarly effort goes to documenting other languages in the Siouan family and he is responsible for comments on the online Comparative Siouan Dictionary (as of summer, 2015). His favorite courses to teach are introductory graduate-level morphology/syntax and English grammar for potential teachers of English as a Second Language, as well as introductions to the structures of Wichita and Lakota.