Tran is broadly interested in syntax, morphology, and Distributed Morphology. His dissertation is a crosslinguistic, crossmodular, and cross-theoretic study of morphological contiguity, elsewhere called *ABA effects. In brief, it will investigate restrictions on allomorphy and suppletion as applied to honorifics, kinship, and pronouns. Tran is a member of the Linguistics in Higher Education Committee of the Linguistic Society of America.