Jessica Coon (PhD 2010), who we earlier announced has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at McGill University, has also been awarded a Banting Post-Doctoral Fellowship, which will allow her to begin her career at McGill with two years devoted mainly to research. Described informally by a colleague as “the Nobel prize of post-docs”, the goal of the Banting fellowship program is “to attract and retain top-tier postdoctoral talent, both nationally and internationally, to develop their leadership potential and to position them for success as research leaders of tomorrow”. As a Banting Fellow, Jessica will be collaborating with McGill’s Lisa Travis (MIT PhD 1984) on an investigation of an array of surprising syntactic parallels between Mayan and Austronesian languages. Congratulations Jessica!