LENA Foundation Scientists behind LENA

The development of LENA has required the many talents of many people. We would like to recognize a few of the scientists who have made LENA possible:

Jill Gilkerson, Ph.D.

  • Language Research Director
  • Ph.D., UCLA Department of Linguistics, concentrating in language acquisition
  • Served as Director of the UCLA Infant Language Lab

Dongxin Xu, Ph.D.

  • Manager of Software and Language Engineering
  • Ph.D., University of Florida, Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • BBN Technologies, National Lab of Pattern Recognition, Beijing
  • Research and engineering expertise includes signal processing, speech and speaker recognition, communication, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks

Jeffrey A. Richards, M.A.

  • Chief Statistician
  • M.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, Clinical Psychology
  • Statistics and Research Methodology Laboratory Instructor, University of Colorado at Boulder
  • Statistical Consultant, University of Colorado at Boulder

Umit Yapanel, Ph.D.

  • Specializing in signal activity detection, speaker segmentation, speaker identification, and acoustic and language modeling
  • Ph.D., University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering
  • Interned at IBM’s Watson Research Center, Embedded Speech Recognition Group
  • Developed robust speech recognition coefficients and a computationally efficient speaker normalization algorithm for embedded systems

Sharmistha Gray, Ph.D.

  • Specializing in analyzing children’s speech, including pre-linguistic protophones, vegetative sounds, and fixed signals
  • Ph.D., University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences
  • Awarded ten patents in speech recognition and telecommunication while working at Avaya