Lisa Spira, 30, is director of research and product development at Ethnic Technologies in South Hackensack, N.J.

Q. What is your educational background?

A. My degree from Syracuse University was in linguistics. I studied a branch of linguistics called onomastics, which involves the history and origin of proper names. In my field I am known as an onomastician.

Have you always been fascinated with names?

Yes. After my sister was born, I took my parents’ baby-naming book and never gave it back. I even added new names. I had Playmobil toys with about 150 plastic people. Not only did I name every one, but I also gave them name tags.

What do you do at Ethnic Technologies?

I lead a team that develops our software that predicts individuals’ ethnic origins based on their full names, addresses and ZIP codes. We build predictive algorithms based on patterns in names from various ethnic groups. We also track demographic data that pinpoints ethnic breakdowns by geography. We identify 158 distinct ethnicities, with further segmentation for Hispanics and African-Americans.