Miriam R. L. Petruck holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is a Visiting Scholar in the Linguistics Department of University of California, Berkeley, the consulting semanticist on a DARPA-funded research project in speech-based situation awareness, and a research affiliate of the FrameNet project, the latter two at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley. She has taught linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as Hebrew language, literature, and culture at Peking University (Beijing, PRC) and the University of California, Davis. She has trained students in Frame Semantics, a linguistic theory about meaning in language, and has contributed extensively to FrameNet, a corpus-based computational lexicography project and the most highly developed instantiation of the theory. Petruck has given numerous talks and presentations at academic conferences and meetings, including as an invited speaker. Her scholarly work has been published on the Internet, in reference works, edited volumes, conference proceedings, and professional journals.

Petruck is the sole proprietor of The Perfect Word, a consulting company that provides unique branding communications services: linguistic analysis for marketing and communications – marketing semantics. Her academic work provides the theoretical foundation of her consulting services, where she helps commercial enterprises and non-profit organizations frame their messages and develop the language to communicate precisely what they mean. By combining data collection techniques of ethnography and analytic tools of semantics, The Perfect Word uses marketing semantics to provide crucial information about names, tag lines, and messages in general for companies, products, and services.