After M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures Jonathan pursued a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Berkeley (Ph.D. 2002). He taught language for the Slavic Department while in the Linguistics program. He is on the faculty of Department of Linguistics at Boston University. His research interests include phonetics, phonology, prosody and intonation, speech perception, language change, Slavic, Turkic, and Uralic languages.