Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jaan Puhvel was an Estonian comparative linguist and mythologist who specialised in Indo-European studies. He was best known as the founder and editor of the Hittite Etymological Dictionary, a project begun in 1984 that reached ten volumes by 2020, and as a longtime professor at UCLA where he founded the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology.
Puhvel's family left Estonia in April 1944 ahead of the expected Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. They emigrated first to Finland and then the following autumn to Sweden, before eventually settling in Canada.
Puhvel earned his MA in comparative linguistics at McGill University in 1952 and his PhD in comparative linguistics at Harvard University in 1959. Between those degrees he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and Uppsala University in Sweden, where his teachers included Emile Benveniste and Georges Dumezil.
The Hittite Etymological Dictionary is a multi-volume reference work tracing the origins of words in the Hittite language, one of the oldest members of the Indo-European family. Jaan Puhvel founded and edited it; the first volume was published in 1984 by Mouton de Gruyter, and by 2020 ten volumes had appeared. From volume 5 onward it complements the Chicago Hittite Dictionary.
At UCLA, Puhvel served as Director of the Center for Research in Languages and Linguistics from 1962 to 1967, Vice Chairman of Indo-European Studies from 1964 to 1968, and Chairman of the Department of Classics from 1968 to 1975. He was appointed full Professor of Indo-European Studies in 1965 and eventually retired as Professor Emeritus of Classical Linguistics, Indo-European Studies and Hittite.
Puhvel received the Governor General's Gold Medal from McGill University in 1952, was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1968 to 1969, and became an Officer First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 1967. In 2001 he received the Estonian Order of the White Star, Third Class.