 I'm a historical linguist and in particular I work on the Sino-Tibetan family so the family of which Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese are the most famous examples but that all together there's about 400 Sino-Tibetan languages. I look at how those languages have emerged through history, what their relationship is, how they split off from one another and then for those languages that have a written tradition like Chinese and Tibetan I also look at in detail how they have changed over time. A teenager when I was 14 I traveled with a school trip actually across northern India and I found myself incredibly interested in Sanskrit literature, Indian philosophy but also Tibetan literature and philosophy as well and at the same time that the kind of work that I was being exposed to on Sanskrit and its relationship to Greek and Latin just didn't exist for Tibetan so I thought well that's a way to spend a life is to try to build some of the resources, make some of the discoveries for Tibetan and its related languages. When I was young I was curious about the history of some Asian languages and I was not able to satisfy my curiosity so I want future teenagers who find themselves curious about those things to find it easier to satisfy that curiosity.