He earned his doctorate from the Department of Uralic and Altaic languages at
Columbia University in December 1955. Afterwards, he returned to
Japan to study the languages
Nivkh,
Orok, and
Ainu, this time with funding from both the Ford Foundation and the
American Philosophical Society. He also conducted research in
Finland, funded by the
New York Botanical Garden. He became Assistant Professor of Linguistic and Uralic Studies at Columbia University in 1958 and Associate Professor from 1962 to 1965. Between 1960 and 1965, together with
Uriel Weinreich,
William Diver, and André Martinet, he was co-editor of the journal
Word. In 1965, he became Professor of Linguistic and Uralic Studies at Columbia, where he served as President of the Department of Linguistics for the following three years. In 1961, with funding from a
National Science Foundation grant to
Michael Krauss, Austerlitz conducted approximately one month of
field work with the
Eyak language, resulting in a collection of at least eight recordings and approximately 600 pages of manuscript notes, now housed at the
Alaska Native Language Archive. In 1965, with funding from
Indiana University, he researched the
Hungarian language by invitation of the Institute for Cultural Relations, located in
Budapest,
Hungary. He was a visiting professor at eight universities, including
Yale,
Helsinki, and the
University of California at Berkeley. He was Councilor of the Interlingua Institute, which funded and promoted
Interlingua, from 1975 until his death in 1994. In 1990, he became President of the
Linguistic Society of America. In the summer of 1994, shortly before his death, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. ==Publications==