About Mick O'Donnell
I am a lecturer within the Department of English Studies at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. I was initially employed under a "Ramon y Cajal" contract (a 5 year research contract) but recently converted to a permanent teaching contract.
My current interests are in corpus linguistics, in particular, in studying learner corpora to profile what grammatical features are most at stake at each proficiency level, for a given mother tongue and learning context. I also develop software for multi-layer corpus development: UAM CorpusTool.
I have previously worked in several major research centres, including, Information Sciences Institute (Los Angeles), Department of AI at the University of Edinburgh, IRST/ITC (Trento, Italy), IPSI/GMD (Germany), as well as visiting stays in centres such as ITRI (Brighton, UK), University of Waterloo (Canada), Telecom Research Labs (Melbourne, Australia), and Microsoft Research Lab (Sydney, Australia).
I am Australian by birth, but live permanently in Spain with my wife and children.