Dr. Richard D. Brecht

Founding Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Study of Language and Co-Founder and Chief Language Officer of Jeenie™

Having received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, Dr. Brecht is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland and currently serves as co-director of the American Councils Research Center, a think tank devoted to providing evidence for language policy and management decisions in education and the work place. Dr. Brecht also is Co-Founder and Chief Language Officer of Jeenie™, a business to provide language help to ordinary people facing everyday communication problems around the world. As an academic entrepreneur, he has help found, build and lead over a dozen academic organizations, including American Councils for International Education, the Center for Advanced Study of Language (a Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Center), the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages, and the National Foreign Language Center. His latest initiative is the STARTALK-DLI Partnerships, funded by the NFLC. Dr. Brecht has testified multiple times before Congress, presents regularly at national and international academic conferences, and has authored numerous scholarly books, textbooks, manuals, and academic articles and reviews on language policy, second language acquisition, and Slavic and Russian linguistics.  Among the latest is a briefing paper “America’s Languages: Challenges and Promise” for the recent Commission on Language Learning of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Finally, Dr. Brecht has received numerous awards from national and international organizations in the language field.