The two invited speakers of the workshop are Cécile Fougeron and Kirsty E. McDougall.
Cécile Fougeron
Cécile Fougeron is a CNRS senior scientist, working at the Phonetics and Phonology Laboratory in Paris (CNRS/University Sorbonne-Nouvelle) since 2002 (https://lpp.in2p3.fr/cecile-fougeron/). She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Paris3-Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1998 under the supervision of Jacqueline Vaissière. During her PhD, she spent several years at the Phonetics Laboratory of UCLA working with Patricia Keating and Sun-Ah Jun, and then did a 4 years post-doc in psycholinguistics at the Laboratory of Experimental Psycholinguistics at the University of Geneva with Uli Frauenfelder.
Her research interests range from the interaction between phonetics and phonology in several variation processes, the phonetic manifestation of prosodic organization, the planning/programming/execution processes in speech production and their disorders, to age-related and individual characteristics in speech.
Kirsty McDougall
Kirsty McDougall is an Assistant Professor of Phonetics in the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Section at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Selwyn College (https://www.phonetics.mmll.cam.ac.uk/staff/dr-kirsty-mcdougall). Her research interests are in speaker characteristics, forensic phonetics, and the phonetic realisation of varieties of English. Her research has, among other things, highlighted the importance of dynamic as opposed to static features of speech (particularly formant frequencies) for characterising differences between speakers, and developed robust techniques for the selection of foils for voice parades. Kirsty has an ongoing program of research investigating the potential of disfluency features to distinguish speakers. In collaboration with Martin Duckworth, she has developed and implemented TOFFA (‘Taxonomy of Fluency Features for Forensic Analysis’) a methodology for the analysis of fluency behavior in forensic casework. Kirsty has also undertaken various studies of variation in consonant realisation in mainstream and Aboriginal Australian Englishes.
Kirsty received her Ph.D. for her work on the role of formant dynamics in determining speaker identity under the supervision of Prof. Francis Nolan at the University of Cambridge. Her postdoctoral studies were undertaken in Cambridge, firstly as part of the forensic phonetics DyViS project, and then through a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Kirsty is currently Principal Investigator on the ESRC-funded project IVIP (‘Improving Voice Identification Procedures’), an interdisciplinary project bringing together researchers in linguistics, psychology, criminology and law, with the aims of improving understanding of earwitness behavior and improving the interaction of the criminal justice system with the use of earwitness evidence.