Matthias Urban is Researcher at the CNRS laboratory ""Dynamique du language"", where he directs an ERC project on historical dynamics in language geography. He has held prior appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the universities of Leiden, Marburg, and Tübingen, where he was principal investigator of the Junior Research Group ""The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes,"" hosted by the University of Tübingen and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)'s Emmy Noether Programme. His research interests include historical linguistics, in particular of the Andes, language contact, and linguistic typology.