Research Overview

I am a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, where I co-direct the Phonetics Laboratory. 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 biological systems coordinate high-dimensional physical dynamics to generate precise behaviour. I focus on spoken language, a system in which the speaker must rapidly control movement in soft tissue structures (e.g. tongue, lips) 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:

• Low-dimensional control of tongue movement. I am developing biomechanical models of the tongue to understand how its mechanical and geometric properties constrain the space of achievable vocal tract shapes. This work investigates how a high-dimensional structure can be controlled via low-dimensional strategies (with Khalil Iskarous & Marianne Pouplier).

• Data-driven inference of control signals in attractor-based motor systems. My previous research identified dynamical laws that govern speech movements (see here, here and here). My current research develops new approaches to inferring time-varying control parameters from data (with Aneta Stefanovska).

• Interpretable acoustic-articulatory inversion. My Royal Society APEX grant focuses on physics-informed machine learning for building interpretable models that link vocal tract movements to speech acoustics (with Anton Ragni).

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

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