Sameer Ud Dowla Khan
Sameer is an associate professor of linguistics at Reed College and co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics. He's technically on a one-year sabbatical from Reed, theoretically working at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative for the 2020-21 academic year, but the pandemic means he's still stuck in his home in Portland. Sameer's primary research specializations are in intonation and voice quality, and he also works on topics in dissimilarity, reduplication, and infant-directed speech, with a focus on Bengali and South Asia in general. He has proposed a phonological model of Bangladeshi Bengali intonation, which he is currently revising and expanding to cover the prosodically diverse languages of South Asia.
Preeti Rao
Preeti Rao is on the faculty of Electrical Engineering at I.I.T. Bombay, teaching and researching in the area of signal processing with applications in speech and audio. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1990. Her research interests include speech recognition, speech prosody, and music information retrieval. She has been involved in the development of technology for Indian music and spoken language learning applications. She co-founded SensiBol Audio Technologies, a start-up incubated by I.I.T. Bombay in 2011, with her Ph.D. and Masters students.
K. P. Mohanan and Tara Mohanan
K. P. Mohanan (Mo) did his Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin; MIT; Stanford University; and the National University of Singapore (NUS). At NUS, he was an active member of the University Curriculum Committee and University Committee for Educational Policy, and the architect of the General Education Program. In 2011, he joined the IISER-Pune faculty, from where he retired at the end of 2016.
Tara Mohanan did her Ph.D. in Linguistics at Stanford University and taught at the National University of Singapore till 2006 when she resigned to return to India to be with her aging parents. She has a range in an educational experience that spans from experimenting with Inquiry-Oriented activities in a 2nd Grade class to advising Ph.D. scholars writing a doctoral dissertation.
Tara and Mo are both internationally well-known researchers in theoretical linguistics, known for both individual and joint work, in phonology and syntax, extending to morphology and grammatical semantics. They co-designed an Inquiry-Oriented undergraduate program in Linguistics at NUS and created a web course on Academic Knowledge and Inquiry before the idea of MOOCs came into existence. They are co-founders of ThinQ (www.ThinQ.education), along with Madhav Kaushish, and continue their joint work as educator-mentor-researcher-thinkers in inquiry and integration for trans-disciplinary knowledge and for education. As part of this work, they have been involved in developing teaching-learning materials for Inquiry and Critical Thinking, and commissioned by UNESCO-MGIEP, on Global Citizenship.
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James Scobbie
James Scobbie is a Professor in the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Queen Margaret University (QMU), Edinburgh, and Director of the Clinical Audiology, Speech and Language (CASL) Research Centre. Before obtaining his Ph.D. in theoretical phonology at the University of Edinburgh, he studied Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence. He has a diverse range of interests and experience within speech-related research, mainly addressing fine grained systematic differences in accents, articulatory phonetics, acquisition, and connected speech. He has contributed significantly to two of QMU’s strategic areas of research strength, the development and refinement of instrumental techniques for the study of speech and their use for the assessment and remediation of speech.
Laura McPherson
Laura McPherson is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Dartmouth College. Her research is driven by primary fieldwork and in-depth description of tonal languages, primarily in West Africa. She has written two reference grammars of African languages, A Grammar of Tommo S (2013) and A Grammar of Seenku (2020).
From a theoretical perspective, her work focuses on diverse aspects of tone, including phonetics, its phonological representation, its interfaces with morphology and syntax. She is currently conducting a cross-linguistic study of musical surrogate languages to document these endangered traditions and analyze their phonetic and phonological underpinnings.
Jennifer Cole
Jennifer Cole did her Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT and taught at Yale and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign prior to joining Northwestern University in 2016. She is an elected Fellow of the AAAS, a Fellow and Distinguished Lecturer in the International Speech Communication Association, and a Mercator Fellow (Germany). Dr. Cole was founding Editor of Laboratory Phonology (one of the first open-access journals in Linguistics) and has served as Chair of AAAS Section Z (Linguistics), and member of the National Research Council Board on Behavioral, Cognitive and Sensory Sciences. She is currently on the editorial board for Cambridge Elements in Phonology, the Bulletin of Sindh Studies (Netherlands: Brill), and the Sindh Journal of Linguistics (Karachi). At Northwestern University, Dr. Cole is Director of Undergraduate Studies for both Linguistics and Cognitive Science.
Dr. Cole’s research investigates prosody and speech dynamics in human languages, towards the goal of understanding the ways in which languages and dialects differ in their sound “profile” and the cognitive systems that support real-time speech production and comprehension. Her work explores how prosodic sound patterns function simultaneously to encode the structure of sentences and larger discourse, meaning related to the communicative situation, the speaker’s emotion, and the dynamics of social interaction. She uses computational and statistical methods to model prosody in experimental and observational data, with an emphasis on methods that enable automated analysis of large, multi-talker/hearer datasets in all human languages. Dr. Cole has pioneered the use of crowd-sourced perceptual ratings of prosody as the basis for building models of prosody in diverse languages from around the world. Dr. Cole’s current research includes collaborative work on prosody in individuals with autism and speech disorders related to neurological impairment, and a speech research infrastructure project to develop an open, scalable, data-driven framework to enable language science researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to collaboratively develop holistic datasets that simultaneously represent a language at many levels of description.
Vijay D’Souza
Vijay D’Souza is a linguistic researcher and language activist currently based in Guwahati, Assam. After working in the field of education for over a decade where he served as Principal of St. Xavier’s Jesuit schools in Arunachal Pradesh, he went on to do a DPhil (Ph.D.) in linguistics at the University of Oxford, which he is about to complete. His thesis explores the synchronic phonology of Hrusso Aka, a fascinatingly complex endangered language of Arunachal Pradesh.
For the past twenty years, he has been engaged in language documentation, preservation, and promotion work among the Hrusso Aka people and, with the help of a dedicated team of native speakers has developed an orthography for the language. As Hrusso Aka is transitioning from a purely oral to a written tradition, he has been involved in publishing a series of books and pedagogical materials in the language. He is currently in the process of setting up a new research-and-support centre for the endangered languages of Northeast India.
Ghada Khattab
Ghada Khattab is a Professor in Phonetics and Phonology in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. Ghada completed her BA in English Language and PG certificate in English Language Teaching at the American University of Beirut before moving to Leeds University where she completed her MA and Ph.D. in Linguistics, specializing in phonological development in monolingual and bilingual contexts. Since then she has been working at Newcastle University where she heads the phonetics and phonology lab. Ghada has spearheaded research in the areas of phonological development in monolingual and bilingual children, Arabic phonetics and phonology, and sociolinguistics. She has collaborated with colleagues at Newcastle, Plymouth, York, France, Norway, Germany, the USA, and around the Arab world on projects that look at language development in lesser studied languages and in multilingual contexts. She has also supervised several doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in this area, and published widely on all aspects of her research.
Binny Abraham
Binny Abraham completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at the Central University of Kerala. His research focuses on historical and acoustic factors of centralized vowels in Dravidian languages. He has experience in the field of language development, working with languages from various families across India.
Paul Foulkes
Paul Foulkes is currently Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York (U.K). Paul completed his BA (Modern Languages), MPhil and PhD in Linguistics from Cambridge University. He works in phonetics, phonology, language variation and change, language acquisition, sociophonetics and forensic speech science. Most of his work focuses on a quantitative analysis of natural speech to examine systematic phonetic variation and its implications for phonological theory.
