Sabine Iatridou

Academic career

Iatridou was born in Thessaloniki. She spent her childhood in the Netherlands, and then returned to Greece to finish high school and attend college. She earned a DDS in 1982, an MA in Anthropology in 1986 from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1991. Under the supervision of Noam Chomsky, she explored the topic of conditionals in her dissertation.

Upon receiving her PhD, Iatridou worked as an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to MIT to take up a position as Professor. She served as director of the MIT Linguistics PhD program for many years. In 2021, she was named the David W. Skinner Professor of Linguistics at MIT.

Iatridou has chaired a number of dissertations on topics in theoretical linguistics. She has explored the semantic and syntactic structures in a range of indigenous languages, including National Science Foundation-sponsored work on Mebengokre, an under-described language from the Je language family that is spoken in the eastern Amazon region of Brazil. Additionally, she has examined the syntax-semantics interface of relative clauses in the Uto-Aztecan languages of Hiaki (Yaqui) and O'odham (Papago).