about

sk

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 complex systems coordinate high-dimensional physical dynamics to generate precise behaviour. I focus on spoken language, a system in which the speaker must rapidly control vocal tract movements 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 give rise to low-dimensional movement patterns (with Khalil Iskarous & Marianne Pouplier).

  • Interpretable acoustic-articulatory inversion. We are developing physics-informed machine learning for building interpretable models that link vocal tract movements to speech acoustics (with Anton Ragni).

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

  • Dynamics of speech production. I conduct vocal tract imaging experiments to study how speakers coordinate articulatory movements during speech. This research uses articulatory data to test predictions from dynamical models, and 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.