Christopher M. (“Chris”) Cieri, C’85, G’85, GR’05, the executive director of the Linguistic Data Consortium at Penn, died on March 25. He was 59.

A native Philadelphian who grew up in South Philadelphia, Dr. Cieri had a lifelong affinity for the Italian language. When he attended Penn for his undergraduate studies, he chose linguistics as his major, graduating in 1985 with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. His thesis “Italian Lexical Items in the English Speech of Italo-Americans,” expanded on his passion for Italian, as did his thesis when he returned to Penn for his PhD in 2005, “Modeling Phonological Variation in Multidialectal Italy.”

Beginning during his undergraduate studies, Dr. Cieri was a research specialist at the Language Analysis Center at Penn, which developed software and other tools for linguistic analysis. In 1990, he became director of Penn Law School’s Computer Services, and in 1998, he joined Penn’s Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), a position he considered his true calling. There, he pursued his dual research interests in linguistics (linguistic variation, phonetics, phonology, morphology, dialectology) and in language-related technologies (linguistic databases, annotation and computer-assisted linguistic analysis and language learning). While at LDC, he supervised its evolution from a small data repository and burgeoning research hub to a prominent global data center. Dr. Cieri made LDC a player in a vital global network that supported the growing language technology/natural language processing community.

While executive director of LDC, Dr. Cieri continued to pursue his research interests. He authored numerous papers, made many presentations around the globe, and served on various advisory boards and committees. His most recent projects included work with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to explore the relationship between language and autism spectrum disorder (in conjunction with LDC director Mark Liberman) and co-editing and contributing to a volume on linguistic variation that is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Dr. Cieri is survived by his wife, Mimi; and his daughter, Caitlin. Donations in his memory may be made to the Abramson Cancer Center.