Bischoff Earns Purdue Fort Wayne Outstanding Research Award for 2023-24

Shannon Bischoff, chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Purdue University Fort Wayne, was officially presented with the 2023–24 Outstanding Research Award at a ceremony on Friday.

Bischoff’s areas of specialty include linguistic anthropology, language policy and planning, educational linguistics, computational linguistics, formal linguistics, linguistic rights, and human rights.

The Outstanding Research Award honors a tenured, full-time faculty member for outstanding performance in the area of research, scholarly activity, or creative endeavor. The honoree must have achieved an exceptional record of contributions to the body of knowledge or creative works in his or her discipline—and must also have had great success communicating that information to a wide audience. Bischoff was chosen for the honor by the Outstanding Research Award committee that consisted of past ORA recipients and his peers. The award is sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs.

Grateful for the accolade given the mission of Purdue Fort Wayne, Bischoff was quick to share his simple philosophy as an educator.

“Everything I do is connected, and there’s only one project, to be a good person,” Bischoff said. “You should be kind, you should be nice – and if you have resources and opportunities – you serve others. My goal is always to serve students as best I can. My goal is to keep building opportunities for our students to be more successful in their own personal and professional lives."

Bischoff completed a double major in anthropology and linguistics for his doctoral work at the University of Arizona, which included a minor in computational linguistics. He was a research fellow at the University of Tokyo and has conducted post-graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. He has secured over $2 million in funding for his work, including seven National Science Foundation grants, one National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and two grants from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science.

Bischoff has presented as an invited speaker at the United Nations, UNESCO, the British Council, Cambridge University, and elsewhere. He is a member of several scholarly societies including the Comparative and International Education Society, the Linguistic Society of America, the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

Among his accolades, Bischoff has received nominations for the Franz Boas Prize and his research team won the Ken Hale Prize in 2018. Actively involved in UNESCO's International Decade of Indigenous Languages initiatives, he was nominated earlier this year for a UNESCO Chair. He has taught at institutions such as the American Indian Language Development Institute and The Institute on Collaborative Language Research.

Bischoff's work has been cited in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, the Routledge Handbook of Linguistics, the Routledge Handbook of Syntax, The Languages and Linguistics of North America, Second Language Learning Theories, and the Handbook of Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity, among others.

For additional information, contact Geoff Thomas at [email protected] or 260-437-7657 (mobile).