Randy LaPolla was born and raised on Long Island in New York. He received a BA in Asian Studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1978 and an MA in Applied Linguistics (TESOL) from the same university in 1980, then lived in China for three years, teaching for one year in Changsha and Shanghai, and studying for two years in the Linguistics Section of the Chinese Department of Peking University. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a second MA and a PhD in Linguistics. After receiving his PhD in 1990, he became an Assistant Research Fellow (Assistant Professor) at the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan (the first Westerner to hold such a position), and later was promoted to Associate Research Fellow (Associate Professor). In 1996 he moved to City University of Hong Kong, where he was an Associate Professor. Since mid-2004 he has been Chair of Linguistics at La Trobe University. He has also recently been chosen by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China to be a Cheung Kong Scholar at the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing for three years, part of an initiative to upgrade selected universities in China to world-class level. His work mainly revolves around the recording and analysis (including comparative studies) of Sino-Tibetan languages (Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and many other languages of China, Burma, and the Himalayan region), and attempting to answer the question of why the languages of this language family are the way they are. A general interest in typology informs this work. From this work he has also developed certain answers to more general theoretical questions, such as the nature of language and its function in communication.