• Research:  I am currently interested in a wide variety of duration, rhythm and timing phenomena in speech. In some research I am looking at how durational characteristics of speech can be used to identify speakers and in other research I study whether listeners can use rhythmic variability to segregate between two speakers speaking at the same time (similar to the cocktail-party effect). I am also interested in the influence of the segmental content of speech for the perception of duration and speech rhythm and I am looking for good methods to extract rhythmic characteristics of speech from the speech signal.
  
  
• Publications: A list of publications can be found here.
  
  
• Research Grants: A list of funded projects can be found here.
  
  
• Teaching: A list of courses and project students can be found here.
  

• Employment: Since August 2010 I am researching and teaching Phonetics and Speech Sciences in the Phonetics Lab at Zurich University (UZH) in Switzerland and occasionally work as an expert witness in forensic phonetics on a freelance basis. Previously I was lecturer in phonetics and speech sciences at University College London (2003-2010) and worked as a consultant and project manager in digital signal processing projects for iQuest Ltd. London. Before that I had research assistant posts at Bonn (2002-3) and Jena Universities (2000-2). I also worked as a guest lecturer at City Univesity London and at Greewich University teaching acoustic phonetics. In 1999 I was an assitant teacher for German at the Icelandic High School Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík.
  
  
• Education: I have a PhD in Phonetics and Communication Sciences from Bonn University (with Wolfgang Hess, Bernhard Schroeder and Petra Wagner) for which I studied the relationships between speech rate and speech rhythm. The thesis is available here. I have an MA in Phonetics & Linguistics from Trier University (with Herman Kuenzel and Herbert Masthoff) focussing on Forensic Phonetics (native language influences on speaker identification abilities by naive listeners). During my undergraduate degree I spent a year in Santiago de Compostela/Spain (1995) studying the phonetics of Galician, a year at Edinburgh University (1996/97) studying phonetics, digital signal processing and Scottish Gaelic, and I was a guest student in the phonetics lab at Saarbruecken University for 6 months (1998)
  
  
• Research Assistants:
  

	Stephanie Bäurle Undergraduate research assistant in Team 'Composed Theatre'
	Dario Brander (MA) Post-graduate research assistant in Team 'Cocktail-Party'
	Daniel Friedrichs (MA) Research assistant and Phd student in Team 'Vocalic variability in speech'.
	Kostis Dimos (MA, MSc) Research assistant and Phd student in Team 'Composed Theatre'.
	Marie-José Kolly (MA) Research assistant and Phd student in Team 'Speaker Identification'
	Lei He (MA, MSc) Research assistant and PhD student in project 'VoiceTime'
	Ephraim Seidenberg Undergraduate research assistant in Team ' Composed Theatre'.

• On the public media
  

• 2014, November 31: Andrea Christen from SRF 4 interviewed me about speaker profiling. You can hear a short version of the interview here or the full version here.
  
• 2014, August: The 'NZZ am Sonntag' reported about my speaker-identification work.
  
• 2013, June: Mathias Jenny, Rachel Weymuth and I gave a workshop at  Mahasarakham University in Thailand. See a TV report on YouTube.
• 2013, March: Richard Friebe from the Frankfurter Allgemeine asked for my opinion on speaker identification and imitation by humans and machines. Read the article here.
• 2013, February: The university paper 'Uni Journal' made a photo-shooting in the phonetics lab on 'What does a phonetician do?'. Read it (or rather: see it) here on pages 14-15.
  
• 2012, August 31: The Swiss radio station DRS 1 reported about a stall we ran with the phonetics lab at a public science fair at Zurich University (listen here).
• 2012, March 19: The Tagesanzeiger asked for my opinion on why whe see a face when we hear a voice (read here).
• 2012, February 20: 20 Minuten reported about the speaker identification research in our lab (read here).
• 2011, March 22: I gave an interview about forensic speaker identification on the Swiss radio DRS 1 (listen here). 
• 2011, March 10: My Antrittsvorlesung was on the UZH News.
• 2010, July 22: The Economist reported on my research ideas of using temporal information for speaker identification.
• 2009, November 6: The Times asked for my opinion on a study showing that babies cry in thier mother tongue.