Richard Van Ness Simmons is Visiting Professor in the School of Chinese at The University of Hong Kong and Professor of Chinese and Immediate Past Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University. He holds a Master's degree in Chinese literature, and a Ph.D. in Chinese linguistics from the University of Washington, Seattle. Simmons' research activities include extensive fieldwork experience investigating and mapping the dialects of Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces in China. He has received numerous grants and awards to support his scholarship, including a multi-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation U.S. China Cooperative Research Program. In Spring 2015 Simmons was the Starr Foundation East Asian Studies Endowment Fund Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His areas of expertise include: Chinese dialectology, dialect geography, historical linguistics, history of Chinese, and Chinese sociolinguistics. His current research project is to compile a comprehensive history of Mandarin and Mandarin dialects. Simmons' publications include Chinese Dialect Classification — A Comparative Approach to Harngjou, Old Jintarn, and Common Northern Wu (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999; revision and translation in Chinese–Beijing: Zhonghua, 2010), Issues in Chinese Dialect Description and Classification (Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series, Number 15, 1999), Chinese Dialect Geography: Distinguishing Mandarin and Wu in Their Boundary Region (Shanghai: Shanghai Education, 2006), Handbook for Lexicon Based Dialect Fieldwork (Beijing: Zhonghua, 2006), Shanghainese Dictionary And Phrasebook (New York: Hippocrene, 2011) and Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text (2014). Professor Simmons undergraduate courses are CHIN1123 "The Story of Mandarin", CHIN1124 "Chinese dialects and sociolinguistics", CHIN2175 "Historical-comparative linguistics and Chinese dialectology"