Prof. Wassink is the Director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory, and an associate professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her research interests lie in sociolinguistics (the study of language in its various social contexts, the relationships between language and social network structure, language attitudes and the outcomes of language and dialect contact) and phonetics (the study of the acoustic properties of spoken language, perception, and physiological aspects of human speech).  One of Prof. Wassink’s principal languages of study is Jamaican Creole. When she is in Jamaica conducting fieldwork, her home base is theUniversity of the West Indies.