Research Fellow
Department of Environmental Health
Harvard School of Public Health
Boston, MA
profile date: nov '06
HST Thesis Research
I studied the acoustic properties of the subglottal airway and its effect on the production of specific vowel and consonant categories. It turns out that the subglottal resonances, although they are less prominent than formants, still are able to influence the perception of vowels, and it seems that both vowels and consonants have second formant frequencies that avoid the regions of the subglottal resonances.
Current Professional Activities
I am a post-doc in a biophysics laboratory where I am learning about cell biology and respiratory physiology. My goal is to bring these tools to bear in the speech sciences and to study the interactions between the acoustics/aerodynamics of speech and the (active and passive) mechanical properties of the vocal tract walls, including the vocal folds.
Personal Statement about SHBT training
I couldn't be happier with the training I received as an SHBT student. I entered the program with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, and was interested in maintaining my ties to the linguistics community while at the same time learning the physics and engineering aspects of speech production and perception. The flexibility of the program allowed me to do this by taking courses in linguistics and involving linguistics faculty in my exams and committees. The density and diversity of resources is phenomenal, with world class speech production and perception research taking place next door to world class linguistics, psychoacoustics, physiological, and clinical research. In SHBT, the sky is the limit.
