In 2015, I spent a term at CELD, Universitas Negeri Papua, in Manokwari, to work with speakers of Biak and Meoswar, two closely related languages of the SHWNG family of Austronesian languages, as well as Kurudu, a more distantly related SHWNG language. This work was funded by a Laming Fellowship at The Queen's College, University of Oxford.

Biak is a well-described language, with two full length theses devoted to it (van den Heuvel 2006; Mofu 2009) as well as a number of other works, and online corpora available (Online documentation for Biak). I worked with a number of speakers on collecting data on its inflectional patterns, including a fully inflected 200 verbs lexicon which put in evidence a number of non-canonical patterns such as defectiveness. I also worked on the semantics of number, dialectal variation, and the semantics of space and movement. This last topic let me discover that some prepositions in Biak can function as enclitic, and that they probably originate in the grammaticalization of movement verbs in serial verb constructions.

For Meoswar and Kurudu, as their extant documentation only included basic wordlists, the work consisted on preliminary documentation of the basic vocabulary, sound patterns, and simple structures of the languages.