Category: Alumni News

Congratulations to Chantale Yunt (BA, 2015), who will enter the PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in Fall 2016! Chantale has spent the past year as an English lecturer at Kamphaeng Phet Rajabhat University in Thailand, teaching English conversation and communication to roughly 300 students from diverse backgrounds and doing some curriculum design. She hopes to return to Thailand in the future to conduct fieldwork on some of the minority languages of the area. Chantale would be happy to answer questions from seniors in linguistics or language studies who are interested in teaching in southeast Asia. If you’d like to get in touch with her, contact the WHASC editors at whasc@ucsc.edu, who will forward your email.

Carol Figueroa, who recently graduated with a double major in linguistcs and computer science, will be starting a master’s in speech and language processing at the University of Edinburgh next year. Not too long ago, she sent this update to WHASC:

I completed my Linguistics degree last Spring. I stayed two extra quarters to complete my BA in Computer Science and have now graduated. I’m writing to share some good news: I have been accepted to the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in speech and language processing program. I was also accepted to Brandeis University’s MA program in computational linguistics, University of Washington’s MS in computational linguistic, and University of Southern California’s MS in computer science. Making my decision was tough. I had been dreaming about attending Brandeis’ program ever since Susan sent an email about the program when I was in my second or third year. Ultimately, I have decided to attend Edinburgh’s Speech and Language Processing program. I want to give a special thanks to Professor Matt Wagers, Professor Marilyn Walker, and Professor Linda Werner for writing all of my letters of recommendation.

After submitting her report, Carol sent us some more good news. She has just been hired as a Speech and Language Researcher for Amazon Lab 126. She writes that “this will help me save up money before moving to Scotland!”

We’re very glad to announce that alumnus Matt Tucker (PhD 2013) has been offered and has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at Oakland University in Michigan. Since earning the PhD at UCSC, Matt has been a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he is affiliated with the Language, Mind and Brain Lab and with the Neuroscience of Language Lab. In the two and a half years that Matt has been at NYU, he has been able to renew his engagement with the linguistics of the Semitic languages, has developed research collaborations with Diogo Almeida, Jon Sprouse, and Ali Idrissi, and has developed a new set of interests and skills in the neuroscience of language. He hopes to maintain those collaborations in his new position and is looking forward to new research possibilities in the large linguistics community of the greater Michigan area (at Oakland itself, at MSU, at Wayne State, and at the University of Michigan). We wish him the best of luck in the next stage of his career!

Alumna Anie Thompson (PhD 2014) just started a new job at H5 in San Francisco. She filed this report about her recent move:

After a stint working on-site at Google, I’ve recently started as an associate consultant at H5 in San Francisco. H5 provides information retrieval and ediscovery services to law firms and other clients, which basically means that the client gives us a corpus of documents for a case, and we go through it in search of the ones that are relevant. Unsurprisingly, linguists are useful for finding things in large corpora, and I’m working alongside a number of linguists here, including fellow UCSC grad alum Tami Schuyler. I’m enjoying the work quite a bit — it’s fascinating to get an inside perspective on litigation, and the actual process of handling the corpora can get pretty interesting, too.