• Our second manuscript in the ImmunoLingo project titled "Linguistics-based formalization of the antibody language as a basis for antibody language models" (preprint), has been published in Nature Computational Sciences! You can read the published article here.
• I have accepted an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream position at University of Toronto, Mississauga, starting in July 2024! The appointment will be 55% in the Department of Language Studies and 45% in the Department of Mathematics and Computational Sciences.
• Our manuscript titled "Linguistically inspired roadmap for building biologically reliable protein language models" (preprint), has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence! Check out the published article here.

I am an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at University of Toronto Mississauga, affiliated with the Departments of Language Studies and Mathematics, Computer Science, and Statistics.

I deeply love planning courses and teaching undergraduate students. In the past, I have taught many courses in Linguistics, and I am very excited to expand more into teaching Computer Science and Computational Linguistics. I am in particular passionate about bridging the gap between linguistic and computational knowledge: both making technical skills accessible to students without a technical background and establishing the importance of theoretical foundations to technically minded students.

My main research interests lie in the intersection of Theoretical Linguistics, Computational/Mathematical Linguistics, and Typology. I use computational methods, most notably tools from formal language theory, in order to gain a better understanding of possible human language patterns. I believe in studying language as a computed output of the human cognitive faculty, and that typological data provides a key for measuring the computational capacity of human cognition.

More recently, I have also become interested in studying currently popular deep neural network-based models of language, particularly in applying a linguistic perspective to better understand their inner workings both for modelling linguistic and non-linguistic data, and to build improved models that are appropriate for even non-linguistic, sequential data.

My work is interdisciplinary at its core, and I have been involved with a very diverse set of research topics, ranging from all subfields of theoretical linguistics and using a variety of computational and mathematical tools. You can see more details about my research projects under Projects.

In my free time, I love tinkering with my website and my LaTeX files, and I am happy to help anyone who has LaTeX questions. See LaTeX for some useful links. To learn about other non-academic related interests, my favorite links should give you some idea.

In short: Call me Mai Ha. Pronounce it as: [maɪ ha].

Extra info: I have a Vietnamese name. Vu is my surname (the name I inherited from my father). Mai Ha are my two given names. In Vietnam, people would call me either Mai Ha or Ha, but I prefer Mai Ha. If you are curious, this is the full Vietnamese version of my name, with tones: Vũ Mai Hà.

Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Delaware. (2020)
M.A. in Linguistics, University of Delaware. (2014)
B.A. in Psychology and concentration in Linguistics, Grinnell College. (2013)