Dr. Rumiko Shinzato received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaii. She joined the Georgia Tech faculty as an Assistant Professor of Japanese in 19 91 and in 2004 was promoted to Professor in the School of Modern Languages. A specialist in pragmatics, historical linguistics (grammaticalization), cognitive linguistics and Japanese and Okinawan linguistics, she has published numerous articles in such refereed journals as Journal of Pragmatics, Linguistics, Language Sciences, and Gengo Kenkyu. She has authored an innovative Technical Japanese book, and has been teaching the course regularly. She received several grants from NEAC (North East Association of Asian Council) and Japan Foundation. She served on an editorial board for SECOL, the advisory board for the nationally acclaimed Distance Learning program Irasshai, and the executive board for International Society for Ryukyuan Studies.　She is also writing several papers on subjectivity, grammaticalization, and discourse particles. She is working on  the joint project, "Advanced/Intermediate Language and Culture through Song: New Materials for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian" funded by the DOE.