News

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2022, spring and summer 2023) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

• Aishwarya Jayadeep (BA 2023) will be starting an MS in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley this fall.
• Chelsea Tang (BA 2022) will be starting her Ph.D. in Linguistics at MIT this fall.
• Calvin Quick (BA 2023) will be starting the Linguistics PhD program at the University of Toronto in September 2023.
• Cid Bryan (BA 2022) is currently working as a substitute teacher and is getting ready to apply to graduate programs in the near future.
• Dara Gaeuman (BA 2022) will be starting the master's program for clinical Speech-Language Pathology at Northwestern University in September 2023.
• Cecilia Elena Bachmann (BA 2023) will begin working as the Emerging Adult Workforce and Education Coordinator for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in Los Angeles. She also has plans to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2024.
• Noah Boihem (Linguistics BA, Computer Science BA 2023) will be attending Nuclear Power School to become a Submarine Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy starting in October 2023. He will be assisting in research at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab until then.
• Corina Chen (BA 2022) will be starting her M.Ed. at Stanford in June 2023 and is looking forward to becoming an English secondary school teacher in the SF Bay Area.
• Gunjan Anand (BA 2023) will be starting her PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the fall.

Congratulations, everybody!

Congratulations to Andrew Cheng (PhD 2020) who has accepted a tenure track offer from the University of Hawai'i to start in August 2023! Andrew also has a new paper out in the Journal of Linguistic Geography titled "A comparative study of English vowel shift and vowel space area among Korean Americans in three dialect regions."

Congratulations to Nik Rolle (PhD 2018), mom Amy, and big brother Jude on the birth of Grace Elisabeth Deverell on October 7.

We wrote to our soon-to-be and recent undergraduate alumni (from 2022 and 2021) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

• Nicholas Ngai (BA 2022) will be starting his master's degree in computer science at UC Berkeley.
• Dara Gaeuman (BA, fall 2022) will be applying to grad school for Speech Language Pathology programs.
• Cynthia Zhong (BA 2022) will be starting her Ph.D. in linguistics at MIT this fall.
• Anjali Kantharuban (BA 2022) will be beginning an MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Cambridge in October 2022. Afterwards, she will do her PhD in Language and Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, studying ways to make natural language computer systems functional on a wider variety of languages and dialects.
• Irene Yi (BA 2021) will be starting in the Linguistics PhD program at Stanford in the fall.
• Ivori White (BA 2022) will be moving to Japan in August to teach English. Before she moves she will be practicing her Japanese and napping her days away.
• Charles Zhang (BA 2021) started a job working on quantum computers in September 2021 and will pursue a further degree in comparative linguistics.
• Margaret Asperheim (BA 2022) will be starting an MA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in August.
• Noah Usman (BA, fall 2021) has started a job as an Insights Associate at Pakistani-American investment firm i2i Ventures, the sister company of startup accelerator Invest2Innovate.
• Jesus Duarte (BA 2022) will be starting his PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at UCLA in the fall.
• Carmela Blazado (BA 2021) will begin the Master’s Program for Speech-Language Pathology at University of the Pacific in August 2022.
• Anna Shim (BA 2022) will be starting at UC Berkeley's BE3 graduate program in education starting June 2022.
• Tegan Lakshmanan (BA 2022) will be starting her PhD in Math at UC Berkeley in the fall.
• Grant Brooks Goodman (BA 2022) will be working at SiriusXM/Pandora as a software engineer in August 2022.
• Cooper Bedin (BA 2022) will be beginning a PhD program in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in September.
• Kevin Yu (BA 2021) will be starting his PhD in linguistics at the University of Florida in fall 2022.

Congratulations, everybody!

Congrats to Julia Nee (PhD 2021), along with coauthors Genevieve Smith, Alicia Sheares, and Ishita Rustagi, on the publication of a new article titled "Linguistic justice as a framework for designing, developing, and managing natural language processing tools" in Big Data and Society! There's a blog post summary of the article here.

Calques is happy to pass along the following update from Keith Johnson and Sharon Inkelas:

Congratulations to Meg Cychosz (PhD 2020) who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA!

Congratulations to Fey Parrill (BA 2000 with linguistics dept. honors; co-founder of the Berkeley Gesture and Multimodality Group), who has been promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University!

Congratulations to Alice Shen (PhD 2020), who has accepted a position as a computational linguist at Grammarly!

Congrats to Zachary O'Hagan, who became an associated member of the Instituto Riva-Agüero in Lima, part of the research group Amazonía indígena contemporánea: Relaciones interétnicas, lenguas e historia with anthropologists Emanuele Fabiano and Joshua Homan.

Alejandro Granados Vargas (BA 2013) was admitted into the PhD program in Education, with an emphasis on Human Development in Context, at UC Irvine. His research area will be in bilingual language development in language impaired children. Congratulations, Alejandro!

Matt Faytak (PhD 2018) reports that, after a 2 year post-doc/lecturer position at UCLA, he has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo, and will start this August. Congrats, Matt!

Calques is saddened to report the passing of colleague and Berkeley Linguistics PhD alumnus Tucker Childs. We are forwarding the announcement sent out to students in Applied Linguistics at Portland State:

With heavy hearts, we are writing to tell you that Professor Tucker Childs passed away yesterday, January 26, 2021. As many of you know, he was admitted to the hospital at the beginning of January. Unfortunately, Tucker was not able to overcome the complications of legionella. He passed away peacefully with his wife and daughter at his side.

If you would like to offer Tucker's family your condolences or help celebrate Tucker's life by sharing a fond memory of your time with him , please visit his memorial page: https://www.inmemori.com/tchilds-u42cg

We will be in touch about memorial events for the department community soon. Even before that, please don't hesitate to reach out to each other and to faculty as we all grieve the loss of our professor, mentor, and colleague. This sad time is even harder since we can't come together physically, but we can still be a community. [...]

In lieu of sending flowers, please consider donating to the Sherbro Foundation—a non-profit dear to Tucker, which empowers rural Sierra Leone through education and agriculture development. Tucker was also a great supporter of the Nattinger Scholarship in our department. You can make a donation in his memory through the PSU Foundation.

Our hearts go out to Tucker's family and to all who knew Tucker. He will be greatly missed.

The Faculty and Staff of Applied Linguistics

Congratulations to Amalia Skilton (PhD, 2019), who will begin a 3-year Klarman Fellowship at Cornell University in July 2021. Klarman Fellowships "provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. Among the most selective of its kind in the country, the program offers independence from constraints of particular grants, enabling the recipients to devote themselves to frontline, innovative research without being tied to specific outcomes or teaching responsibilities."

Congratulations to Christian DiCanio (PhD, 2008) who has been awarded tenure at Buffalo!

Congratulations to Drs. Cheng, Cychosz, Dawson, and Shen who have recently completed their dissertations!

• Andrew Cheng: "Accent and ideology among bilingual Korean Americans”
  Andrew will be starting in a post-doctoral research position at UC Irvine in September.
• Meg Cychosz: "Phonetic development in an agglutinating language"
  Meg started a post-doctoral research position at the University of Maryland in August.
• Virginia Dawson: "Existential quantification in Tiwa: disjunction and indefinites"
  Ginny is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Western Washington University.
• Alice Shen: "Costs and cues in the auditory comprehension of code-switching"
  Alice spent the summer working at Facebook and will be teaching at Reed College during 2020-21.

The dissertations are all available on our departmental website.

In connection with the campus celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University of California, the linguistics department has made a web page honoring some of the many women who have contributed to our work over the last 120 years:

https://lx.berkeley.edu/women-berkeley-linguistics

This may expand or evolve in the coming days and months. The committee that put the page together (Madeline Bossi, Margaret Cychosz, Andrew Garrett, Zachary O'Hagan, Emily Remirez, and Tessa Scott) is very grateful to the many contributors who wrote thoughtfully and shared pictures.