Research Overview

I am a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, where I co-direct the Phonetics Laboratory and lead the Speech Physics Group. I am also affiliated with the Data Science and AI Institute. I currently serve as associate editor at Journal of Phonetics and area chair for Interspeech 2026. I was awarded my PhD in 2014 from the University of Sheffield.

My research investigates how complex systems coordinate high-dimensional physical dynamics to generate precise behaviour. I focus on spoken language, a system in which the speaker must rapidly control vocal tract movements to generate meaningful acoustic signals that are a nonlinear consequence of those movements. This makes speech a wonderful test case for understanding the dynamics of control in complex systems more generally. I study this using a combination of vocal tract imaging (MRI, ultrasound, electromagnetic articulography) and computational modelling. My research is funded by UKRI (2019-25) and The Royal Society (2025-27) and currently focuses on the following areas:

• Data-driven discovery of dynamical laws. My primary research goal is to uncover the dynamical principles that structure speech communication. My previous work discovered dynamical laws that govern speech movements (see here, here and here). My current research is developing new approaches to inferring time-varying control structures from data (with Aneta Stefanovska).

• Interpretable acoustic-articulatory inversion. We are developing physics-informed machine learning for building interpretable models that link speech acoustics to vocal tract movements and the underlying control dynamics of speech (with Anton Ragni).

• Dynamics of speech production. I conduct vocal tract imaging experiments to study how speakers coordinate articulatory movements during speech. This research uses articulatory data to test predictions from dynamical models, and to characterise cross-linguistic and cross-speaker variation in articulatory strategies (with Patrycja Strycharczuk).

• Low-dimensional control of tongue movement. I am developing biomechanical models of the tongue to understand how its mechanical and geometric properties give rise to emergent, low-dimensional movement patterns (with Khalil Iskarous & Marianne Pouplier).

I also develop hardware and software for experiments and computational research. You can find some examples here and at GitHub.