We are pleased to introduce 6 new PhD students who joined the department in Fall 2023. They each have unique backgrounds and research interests, and we are excited to see what they accomplish over the next few years!
Xiaolin Niu: Before joining UW, Xiaolin completed her undergraduate and master's in Chinese Language and Literature at two universities in China. Her research interests involve semantics, semantic-syntax interface, and Chinese linguistics. Beyond research, she enjoys detective novels, running, and experimenting with dark cuisine creations.
Sunkulp Ananthanarayan: Sunny is interested in language documentation and its potential intersections with sociolinguistics in Panära (Jê). They're interested in holistic language description at all levels of linguistic analysis, so in honor of their love of cats, would describe themself as being pspspsps-side. Sunny's free time is occupied with board games and TTRPGs, dancing, fiber arts, and Wikipedia editing.
Jessa Jeter: Jessa is a first year PhD student studying language acquisition and development under a community-based language documentation lens. She is a member of the fieldwork team working with the Panãra, an indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon, and her current research investigates into the language environment of Panãra children. Jessa recently completed a master’s degree in language documentation and conservation from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and since moving back to her home state of Washington has adopted a lovely 3-year old cat named Basil.
Ty Gill-Saucier: Ty is from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. His research interests are language ideology, phonetics, and French-lexified creoles. When he is not doing research or studying, he enjoys travelling and trying new foods from wherever he is. He also enjoys baking and testing out recipes for those foods when he is home.
Christopher Haberland: Chris moved from Virginia to Seattle in 2017 and finished the CLMS program in 2019. He has recently returned to the department to study biases of neural language models and their training signals, including in multimodal contexts. He also cultivates an interest in language documentation and tooling. He enjoys strategy games, running, hiking, biking, and racket sports (especially tennis)!
Florian Humbert: Flo’s is interested in everything sociolinguistics, from traditional dialectology to sociophonetics and language regard, as well as in cultural translation. In his free time, he enjoys playing board games like Go and Shogi, watching football, and reading about history and science (and the history of science).