About Me

Tajk'aneenek! My name is Jonah Bates and I am a teacher and linguist, aspiring to school leadership, with an insatiable curiosity. Since Fall 2020, I have been a science teacher at Van Horn High School in the Independence School District. I have taught Zoology, Biology, Forensic Science, Earth Science, and Intro to Health Services, and also tutor a wide variety of sciences, maths, and more. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to set up tutoring!

During the summers, I am now also a teacher and research mentor for the STAR 2.0 Program at the Children's Mercy Hospital Research Institute. It is an amazing 6-week intensive program for high schoolers to learn about and participate in biomedical research. Feel free to contact me for help applying. 

On December 12, 2025, I graduated from Northwest Missouri State University with an Education Specialist degree in K-12 Leadership. Before high school teaching, I completed a PhD in linguistics from the University of Kansas in 2020. I also have a strong background in physics (BA 2012- MU), chemistry, biology, anthropology, and math.

My dissertation Typology and Analysis of Change in Person Marking Reference (PhD 2020 - KU) investigates diachronic change in the number, person, and clusivity reference of person markers across 10 language families and 430 languages. I track the shift trajectory and posit that the causes for the observed directionality lie in the interaction between the markers' underlying semantic/syntactic architecture and the pragmatics of their use in discourse.