Dr. Maria Polinsky is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park and Director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. Her research interests include syntactic theory, language universals, cross-linguistic variation, and heritage languages study. Professor Polinsky has conducted in-depth research on various language-related topics such as syntax-prosody interface, ergativity, and word orders. She has also done primary work on languages spoken in diverse regions including the Caucasus, the Pacific, and Central America. In her work on heritage languages, she focuses on the structural properties associated with unbalanced bilingualism as well as on the implications of these findings for heritage language pedagogy.