Keynote speakers

 Eugenia San Segundo

     Eugenia San Segundo Fernández holds degrees in Hispanic Philology and English Philology from the University of Salamanca, a PhD in Phonetic Studies from the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) and the International University Menéndez Pelayo, and a Master's degree in Phonetics and Phonology from the same university. After completing her doctoral thesis on forensic phonetics in Spain, she conducted a significant part of her research abroad, mainly in England and Switzerland.

    She joined the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in January 2024 as a Tenured Scientist and head of the CSIC Phonetics Laboratory. She is also the Editor in Chief of the scientific journal Loquens (published by CSIC). Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of the project "What Makes a Voice Human? Towards a Better Understanding of the Phonetic Features that Differentiate Real Voices from Deepfakes," funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

     The topic of her talk will be "Voice Quality in Forensic Phonetics: When, How, and Why?"

Felix Schaeffler

        Felix Schaeffler was born and grew up in Munich, Germany and also studied for his first degree there.

      He holds an MA in Psycholinguistics (with Phonetics and Logopedics as minor subjects) from the University of Munich, and completed his PhD in 2005. In 2009 he became a lecturer in Speech and Hearing Sciences at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. A large proportion of his research in recent years has addressed the prosody of speech, especially intonation and voice quality. He has worked on intonation from both a clinical and cross-linguistic perspective, for example as a research associate on the ESRC funded project ‘Cross-Linguistic Differences in Pitch Range’. He has collaborated on topics of intonation and voice quality with colleagues from various universities, and he is currently collaborating with colleagues from QMU and the University of Umeå, Sweden, investigating the prosodic effects of Parkinson’s disease.

       His research on voice quality focuses on issues of occupational voice disorder and acoustic voice assessment for clinical and non-clinical purposes. He is a co-founder of the Community Interest Company FitvoiceTM, which provides a technology-enabled, smartphone-assisted voice care service.

 Radek Skarnitzl  

     Radek Skarnitzl is a professor at the Institute of Phonetics at Charles University in Prague. He is interested in various aspects of speech communication, with expertise in speech prosody, second language (L2) acquisition, and acoustic phonetics. He currently focuses on effective ways of teaching English prosody to L1 speakers of Czech. He is also interested in the effect of various pronunciation features on the socio-psychological evaluation of a speaker in both native and foreign languages. Another area of his research is related to speaker identification and forensic phonetics, particularly the effects of voice disguise on speaker recognition by both humans and automatic systems. In addition, he continues to research the prosodic properties of Czech, relating prosodic features with information structure.

      His talk will focus on "Phrasal prosody as a cornerstone for teaching the pronunciation of L2 English".

 Jane Stuart-Smith

        Jane Stuart-Smith studied at University College London (UCL) and Oxford University, where she graduated with an M.Phil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology in 1991. Continuing her postgraduate studies at Oxford University, she undertook doctoral research in Historical Phonology and completed her dissertation in 1996.

     Joining the University of Glasgow in 1997, she subsequently established the Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics (GULP) in the following year and continues to serve as its co-director. She was appointed as appointment as Professor of Phonetics and Sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow in 2013.

      Jane’s research agenda focuses on the interrelation between speech and societal structures. Her articles include publications addressing the phonetic variation observed across diverse languages and accents, notably encompassing the Glaswegian vernacular and British Panjabi varieties. Furthermore, her research interests extend to the impact of media on language change, a topic she explored in a course at the 2015 Linguistic Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Chicago. Endeavouring to promote public mainstream education on speech and accent diversity, Jane co-developed the educational website Seeing Speech.