Phonetics Lab alumnus Dr. Brynhildur Stefánsdóttir MacDonald (PhD 2023) has joined the Cornell Center for Regional Economic Advancement (CREA) as a Program Coordinator for entrepreneurship programs.

In her new position, Brynhildur provides support and coordination for individuals or startups seeking help and education in developing their product or business. CREA runs over 20 different programs, and within these Brynhildur supports the following programs aimed at PhDs and researchers: 

• -Dairy Runway: Supports dairy entrepreneurs from ideation through to growth by teaching customer discovery, business planning and development, and prototyping.

• -W.E. Cornell: helps STEM PhDs and postdocs commercialize their innovations and overcome the challenges of leading a growing technology-based business. 

• -NSF I-Corps North East Corridor: offer regional training courses to members of the scientific community that are pursuing commercialization. 

• -Technology Innovation Fellows Program:  Entrepreneurship initiatives aimed at helping PhD students and post-docs in the life sciences (LSTIF) or those focusing on clean energy and climate technology (GTIF) 

Brynhildur transitioned to this role to move from purely research-oriented work to areas within higher education that focus on student and community engagement.

She finds doing a PhD helped her in her new role, since it requires strong organizational skills, attention to detail, the ability to manage multiple priorities effectively and meet tight deadlines. Her dissertation research also helped her feel comfortable adapting to new programs. 

Brynhildur invites anyone with a unique product or service idea to contact her. She is currently working in downtown Ithaca, at CREA's startup incubator Rev, above the Bike Bar, near the Ithaca Commons.

On Dec 16, 2024, Ph.D. student  Nielson Hul successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, which is titled "Implosives in Khmer".

Shown in the picture, from left - dissertation Committee member Dr. Sam Tilsen, Nielson Hul, Committee Chair Dr. Abby Cohn, and Committee member Dr. John Whitman.
 

Phonetics lab grad student Yao Zhang presented a paper at the 30th Annual Conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL 2024), held at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea on May 25-27, 2024.

Her paper was titled:  Tonal contrastive hierarchy in Beijing Mandarin.  

The Cornell Linguistics department had a strong showing at the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19) , hosted by HIPCS (Hanyang Institute for Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language) at Hanyang University on June 27-29, 2024.

The following papers were presented by:

• -Faculty member and Phonetics Lab director Dr. Sam Tilsen
• -Current grad students Chloe Kwon and Fengyue Zhao
• -Phonetics Lab alumni Dr. Seung-Eun Kim and Dr. Francesco Burroni

---- Dr. Sam Tilsen ----

Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Is prosodic phrase structure planned? Evidence from phrasal lengthening, autocorrelation, and Markov statistics in spontaneous speech

Mark Tiede, Sam Tilsen (Yale University; Cornell University)
Temporal flexibility of articulation within syllables

---- Chloe Kwon & Fengyue Lisa Zhao  ----

Chloe D. Kwon, Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Phonetic evidence for compound tensification in Korean as a function of morphological context

Fengyue Lisa Zhao, Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Syllable Position Prominence in Unsupervised Neural Network Segment Categorization

---- Cornell Phonetics Lab Alumni Seung-Eun Kim and Francesco Burroni ----

Seung-Eun Kim, Qingcheng Zeng, Bronya R. Chernyak, Joseph Keshet, Matthew Goldrick, Ann R. Bradlow (Northwestern University; Northwestern University; Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; Northwestern University) - Quantifying perceptual similarity of connected speech

Seung-Eun Kim, Matthew Goldrick and Ann R. Bradlow (Northwestern U) Large-scale assessment of speech intelligibility

Angelo Dian, Francesco Burroni (University of Melbourne; Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU Munich)
A machine learning investigation of durational and non-durational cues to stop gemination in Italian across regional varieties and speaking rates