Kirill is a Russian Ph.D. who has been trained by West African specialists and field-oriented typologists in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Since 2008 he has focused on the Mombo (also known as Kolu-So) language with a base in the picturesque village of Songho just west of Bandiagara. In January 2009 he was a visiting scholar for one month at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, which also provided him with a stipend to support his 2008 fieldwork. He has made return trips to Dogon country in 2009, 2010 and 2011. He has also studied Ampari, and did short pilot-studies of Bunoge and Penange. From 2010 to 2014 he was based at Humboldt University (Berlin) where he worked on the project "Predicate-centered focus types: A sample-based typological study in African languages", part of the larger project SFB 632 "Information Structure" funded by German Science Association (DFG).
