Tamminga Lab - People

Who’s around?

Headshot of a white woman with wavy light brown hair, wearing an olive blouse. Meredith Tamminga is the lab director and an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Penn. She is also a lead researcher on the Philadelphia Signs Project and an Associate Editor at Glossa Psycholinguistics.

Headshot of an Asian woman with long dark hair wearing a white button-up and black jacket. May Chan is a 2026 Penn Linguistics PhD who is now a postdoc in the Voice Lab at Syracuse University and retains a visiting affiliation with our lab. Broadly speaking, she is interested in speech production in World Englishes. Lately, she has been working on systematic biases in English-ASR systems modulated by speakers’ language backgrounds. She has also been working on how sociolinguistic factors condition pitch use in speech production in conversational data.

Headshot of a multiracial man with facial hair, a mustache, and glasses, wearing a shirt and tie. Wesley Mark Lincoln is a fourth year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (co-advisors: Gareth Roberts and Meredith Tamminga). His interests are centred around sociophonetic variation and change, and the modelling of these phenomena using evolutionary biological theories. He is interested in Romance and Germanic languages and the languages of his native Singapore.

Headshot of a Black non-binary person with glasses and piercings standing behind a flower. Mikaela Martin is a fourth year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (co-advisors: Florian Schwarz and Meredith Tamminga). Their research interests include sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and semantics. Broadly speaking, Mikaela is focused on the psycho-social underpinnings of language, and group membership.

Headshot of a white woman with glasses and a long ponytail wearing a turtleneck. Brittany Zykoski a fourth year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (co-advisors: David Embick and Meredith Tamminga). Her research interests include sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and variation. Lately, she has been working on phonetic convergence towards different allophonic distributions of the same variable.

Headshot of an Asian man with glasses standing outside in a black coat and scarf. Le Xuan Chan is a third year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Meredith Tamminga). His research interests are multilingualism, phonetics, and sociolinguistics. He is particularly interested in how the interaction of multiple languages at the individual level contributes to variation in multilingual societies, and exploring these topics through the lens of acoustic and articulatory phonetics.

Headshot of a Black woman with a ponytail wearing a black zip-up. Jahnai Garner is a third year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Meredith Tamminga). Jahnai’s research interests include psycholinguistics. More specifically, she is interested in how sociolinguistic variation interacts with language processing.

Headshot of an Asian man wearing a white button-up against a white background. Po-Hsuan Huang is a first-year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Meredith Tamminga). His research focuses on how structural and cognitive-functional factors condition linguistic variation and change. His recent studies include the investigation of how information density affects speech variation in the acoustic-articulatory domains and Mandarin classifier choices on the syntactic level.

Old friends

Xin Gao completed her Ph.D. in 2025.
Andrea Beltrama was a MindCORE postdoctoral fellow and lab affiliate from 2019-2024. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware.
Aini Li completed her Ph.D. in 2024. She is now an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong.
Gwen Hildebrandt completed her Ph.D. in 2024.
Sophie Faircloth completed her MA in 2024 and is now a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the University of Michigan.
Lefteris Paparounas completed his Ph.D. in 2023. He is now an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at UQAM.
Lacey Wade completed her Ph.D. in 2020 and was a postdoc in the lab from 2020-2022. She is now an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kansas.
Yiran Chen completed her Ph.D. in 2023 and is now a post-doctoral fellow in Psychology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Wei Lai completed her Ph.D. in 2021. She is now a Language Engineer at Amazon.
Ruaridh Purse completed his Ph.D. in 2021. He is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Phonetics at the University of Michigan.
Yosiane White completed her Ph.D. in 2021. She is now an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at University College Utrecht.
Ava Creemers completed her Ph.D. in 2020. She is now a Research Policy Officer at the University of Amsterdam.
Sabriya Fisher completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now a Diana Chapman Walsh Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Wellesley College.
Amy Goodwin Davies completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now a Data Scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Duna Gylfadottir completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now a Linguist at Grammarly.
Betsy Sneller completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now an Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at Michigan State University.
Robert Wilder completed his Ph.D. in 2018. He is now a Data Scientist/Software Engineer at Oncora Medical.
Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin completed his Ph.D. in 2017. He is now the Director of AI and R&D at Nexalogy.
Edward Rider-Bezerra completed his MA in 2017. He is now a Boost Services Consultant at Epic.
Eli Cooper was our lab coordinator from 2014-2017. She is now a Technical Solutions Specialist at OpenWeb.