Short Bio
I first fell in love with phonetics in 2013 in an introductory class that was part of my B.A. in Language and Communication. After finishing my philological and linguistic undergraduate studies in Marburg, I moved to Munich to study at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing. In 2023, I was awarded my PhD in phonetics as part of the ERC project InterAccent supervised by Prof. Jonathan Harrington. My PhD thesis was about a cognitive and computational account of the change from pre- to post-aspiration in Andalusian Spanish.
Currently, I work in Paris as a Post Doc in the project DIPVAR with Profs. Ioana Chitoran (Université Paris Cité) and Martine Adda-Decker (LPP). We explore the acoustic variability related to the diphthong-hiatus contrast in five Romance languages, using large corpora (~1000 hours) of naturalistic speech.
I am interested in all facets of sound change: its historical, phonological, and phonetic origins as well as the mechanisms by which a new variant of a sound spreads through a speech community. In my research I apply functional analyses, often on large-scale acoustic data, and computational modelling techniques to gain insights into specific sound changes. I do most of my programming and data processing in R, but I also use python and bash.
When I am not working, I enjoy reading (favorite book: “Die Wut, die bleibt” by Mareike Fallwickl) and listening to music (current favorite album: “Loops” by Jordan Rakei; favourite vocalist: Yebba), going to cafés and the cinema with friends, doing nail art and painting ceramics, and visiting the ducks in my local park. Also, my brother Sam is an incredibly talented artist located in Berlin, check out his music photography and videography projects here.
Education
PhD in Phonetics and Speech Processing, 2019-2023
University of MunichM.A. Phonetics and Speech Processing, 2016-2018
University of MunichB.A. Language and Communication, 2013-2016
University of MarburgB.A. Romance Philology, 2012-2016
University of Marburg & University of Madrid