Prof. Eithne Guilfoyle joined DCU as Executive Dean of Humanities in 2004. Her primary research interests lie in the areas of syntax and first language acquisition. Her work focuses on the syntax and acquisition of Irish and other verb-first languages, especially with respect to word-order, verb-placement and the grammatical properties of subjects. She graduated with a BA in Linguistics and Old and Middle English from UCD in 1979 and moved to Canada where she received a MA and Ph.D in Linguistics from McGill University in 1990. She held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill and MIT, taught at McGill University and Queen's University (Ontario) and was on faculty at the University of Calgary from 1992 to 1998. She served as the Head of Humanities and the Acting Head of the School of Science and Technology at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire between 1999 and 2003.