Megha Sundara, PhD
Megha Sundara, chair of the UCLA Department of Linguistics and director of the Language Acquisition Lab at UCLA, has been appointed the Bruce Hayes Centennial Professor of Linguistics.
Sundara’s research centers on infant language acquisition — how babies listen to the language being spoken around them and eventually learn to talk. She leads a team of investigators studying infants’ and young children’s language perception and production abilities, with the goal of understanding how they develop the tools that enable them to understand and produce grammatical sentences.
The endowed chair that Sundara will hold was initially established in 2019 under a different name, the Theresa McShane Biggs and Henry P. Biggs Centennial Term Chair in Linguistics. Theresa and Henry Biggs donated funds for the chair in honor of Bruce Hayes, now a distinguished professor emeritus, who was Henry Biggs’ advisor during his doctoral program. Hayes was the inaugural holder of the chair until his retirement in 2023, at which point the chair was renamed the Bruce Hayes Centennial Term Chair in Linguistics. (The chair’s centennial moniker is a nod to its establishment during the Centennial Campaign for UCLA, which ended during the campus’s 100th year.)
“This chair, this gift, is in gratitude for the extraordinary teaching and mentoring of the one and only Bruce Hayes,” Biggs said during the 2019 celebration of Hayes’ chairholder installation.
Both Theresa and Henry Biggs earned master’s degrees in Romance linguistics at UCLA, and Henry earned his doctorate in 1996. The couple have been champions of the Department of Linguistics ever since, supporting UCLA Phonetics Lab research and the Linguistics Department Discretionary Fund. Most recently, the Biggses donated to establish the Patricia Keating Distinguished Lecture Series. The program honors Distinguished Research Professor Emerita Patricia Keating, who was a UCLA Linguistics faculty member from 1981 to 2022, director of the phonetics lab from 1991 to 2022 and department chair from 2018 to 2022.
Beyond linguistics, the couple has generously given to help UCLA students broaden their horizons through the Theresa McShane Biggs and Henry P. Biggs Graduate Student Travel Fund in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and by supporting the UCLA College Division of Humanities’ World Languages Day Fund. Henry Biggs is also an active member of the Division of Humanities Dean’s Advisory Board.
Henry Biggs, PhD
Bruce Hayes, PhD