Yuan Chai joined the Department of Linguistics as a teaching associate this year with a 2022 PhD from the University of California San Diego. As a phonetician and fieldworker, Chai's research is centered on the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of various phonation types, including creaky, breathy, and falsetto voices. Her fieldwork includes documenting the Yateé Zapotec language, indigenous to Oaxaca, Mexico, and also spoken by diaspora communities in Los Angeles. She focuses on developing educational materials for the language community and analyzing Yateé Zapotec's unique linguistic features, with a particular emphasis on tone and phonation. Chai will be teaching LING 450 Introduction to Linguistic Phonetics and LING 471 Computational Methods for Linguists in the Spring quarter.