• County South

    LA1 4YL Lancaster

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

I am interested in supervising students in the following areas: articulatory phonetics, vocal tract imaging, Articulatory Phonology / Task Dynamics, mathematical modelling of speech production and spoken language, computational speech processing, voice and robotics, bioacoustics.

20092025

Research activity per year

Personal profile

SUMMARY of research interests (100 words)

I am senior lecturer in the Phonetics Lab, Department of Linguistics and English Language and Data Science Institute at Lancaster University. I am also associate editor at Journal of Phonetics. I was awarded my PhD in 2014 from the University of Sheffield.

My research investigates the dynamics of spoken language, such as how people coordinate movements of the tongue, lips and larynx to produce speech. I do experiments that monitor acoustic signals and vocal tract movements using sensors and imaging technology, and build computational models of the cognitive and physical mechanisms that underpin spoken language. I apply these insights to a range of longstanding scientific puzzles, such as the control of speech production, the mysteries of sound change, and how to improve the use of speech technologies in everyday life. In doing so, I draw upon theory and methods from linguistics, cognitive science, physics, and computer science.

I am currently working on the following projects:

  • Interpretable acoustic-articulatory relations in speech production (Royal Society, 2025-27)
  • Modelling the dynamics of phonetic variation & phonological change (AHRC fellowship, 2024-25)
  • TARDIS: Targets and dynamics in speech (AHRC, 2019-23)

You can find my personal webpage here, which contains more information.

Current Teaching

I am not teaching during the 2025/26 and 2026/27 academic years due to research grant commitments.

Related documents

Keywords

  • English Language and Linguistics

User-defined keywords

  • phonetics
  • speech production
  • articulatory phonology
  • speech
  • dynamical systems
  • articulation
  • acoustics

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