Born Frank Merritt Ruhlen, 1944,[REF] Ruhlen studied at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest.
Since 1994, he has been a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford and co-director, along with Murray Gell-Mann (and, until 2005, the late Sergei Starostin), of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages [REF].