Bruce Hayes - Personal

I was born in Seattle, WA during the Eisenhower administration.

In my family, there were four sisters and me.  I was the second oldest.  My parents really valued education and their encouragement was very important to me, all the way through my academic career.  They both  passed away some time ago but their children still gather regularly at vacations and Christmas time.

My family moved around a number of times when I was little, but ultimately settled in Ithaca, N.Y, where my siblings and I grew up, attending the public schools there.

I did my college training at Harvard (1973-1976). I discovered linguistics as a first-week freshman by flipping through the course catalog and spotting the linguistics section. I then showed up at intro on the first day of classes, sealing my fate (the teacher was Prof. Jay Jasanoff, still on the faculty there). Two Harvard faculty who hugely influenced me were Judith Aissen and Jorge Hankamer. 

In my senior year at Harvard I was very excited to be admitted to the Linguistics graduate program at MIT, which is still going strong. My dissertation adviser there was Prof. Morris Halle, a really wise man who co-founded my academic discipline and provided strong and essential guidance to me and many others.

After finishing my degree in 1980, I served as a temporary lecturer at Yale for a year.  I learned a lot about historical linguistics there from my colleagues and students.

Then in 1981 I got my current job at UCLA. I was hired as an Assistant Professor, and have over the years been promoted to other job titles (Associate Professor, Full Professor, and so on). I was Department Chair from 2013 to 2017. The UCLA Linguistics Department has been a great place to pursue a career in linguistics and I have always valued my colleagues and students, both graduate and undergraduate.

I was  married in 1989 to Pat Keating, also a professor in the UCLA Linguistics Department. The picture, taken 1992, shows our son Peter when he was a little kid.

Peter Hayes and Bruce Hayes May 2018

 Peter is grown up now and works as a Tech Lead software engineer in San Francisco for Remix, a company that helps plan public transit.

Hobby Section

My hobbies are pretty much all musical. I play violin in the Palisades Symphony Orchestra under the direction of maestro Joel Lish, and at home I play the piano.
With Pat I like to sing shape note music, and sometimes we go dancing.

Baby Picture Section

Every human being, myself included, was once an extremely effective device for learning languages, outclassing any existing computer algorithm by miles. My period of glory took place in the mid 1950's.

Here are pictures of me as a baby investigating a pine cone.


Here is a picture of me investigating an important object with the help of my father and my older sister.

This is me neglecting to point at something, flanked by my sisters, who are with the program. Note that children in the 1950's frequently wore leather shoes.

Other

I have a personal page using the Google web service where I post a couple of other things, e.g. family biography, shape note music).

Back to Bruce Hayes's Home Page