Richard Sproat received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He has worked at AT&T Bell Labs, at Lucent's Bell Labs and at AT&T Labs Research, before joining the faculty of the University of Illinois. From there he moved to the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Health & Science University. In the Fall of 2012 he moved to Google, New York as a Research Scientist. Sproat has worked in numerous areas relating to language and computational linguistics.