Jane Simpson retired in 2022 and became Professor Emerita at ANU.  She majored in Chinese and English literature at ANU, followed by honours in Middle English and an MA in Linguistics (1977).  She spent 10 months in Moscow as an ANU exchange scholar (1977-78).  She has carried out fieldwork on Indigenous Australian languages since 1979, and received a PhD in linguistics from MIT in 1983 for a study of Warlpiri in the Lexical-Functional Grammar framework.  She was a Sloan postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She then worked in Central Australia on Warumungu language and language maintenance, and helped set up a language centre in Tennant Creek. She also carried out consultancies (e.g. Aboriginal Legal Aid, Aboriginal Sacred Sites Protection Authority), and worked on the Warumungu land claims.  In 1987-89 with David Nash she worked as lexicography fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, helping set up a digital archive of Aboriginal language material, which became ASEDA.  In 1989 she became a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney. In 2005, with Mary Laughren and David Nash, she shared the Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute Inaugural Ken Hale Chair.  In 2011 she moved to ANU as the inaugural chair of Indigenous linguistics and head of the School of Language Studies (2011-2014).  In 2014 the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language was established, and she acted as Deputy Director until the Centre came to a natural end in 2022.

PhD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), MA in Linguistics (Australian National University), BA (Hons) (Australian National University)