John Brandon Lowe

I am a linguist, lexicographer, librarian, search engine wizard, and museum informatics engineer.

I am a membre associé at the Centre d’Etudes Himalayennes, CNRS, Paris and the Tech Lead for Discovery for five museums at UC Berkeley (the Berkeley Art Museum, the Pacific Film Archive, the University and Jepson Herbaria, and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology), responsible for public-facing web applications and assisting with data curation and development.

Prior to taking up museum work, I worked in search engine startups (Ask Jeeves!, now Ask.com acquired by IAC, and Powerset, acquired by Microsoft and incorporated into Bing) and before that was an academic researcher and lecturer in the fields of computational linguistics and historical linguistics. I spent 27 years writing an etymological dictionary of Sino-Tibetan languages. In the 80's I was one of the principal engineers of the University of California MELVYL, the first public access online library catalog. I have also built a number of houses, treehouses, and domes.

I grew up in Asia (Philippines, Thailand, eventually graduating from high school in India), earned a B.A. from Yale College in 1977, an M.L.I.S (library and information science) from the University of California Berkeley in 1987, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California Berkeley in 1995.