It's official: I'm now a tenured associate professor!  
news.okstate.edu/articles/communications/2023/regents_approve_personnel_actions_june_23.html

I will soon be my department's first Director of Undergraduate Education. This will be a new step into administrative duties, and I hope it will allow us to take a big-picture view of our curriculum and student needs. 

Several students from my lab graduated this weekend, and many have received awards this year. I gave five cords for undergrad contributions to research, and two of my students were named Top 10 Seniors in the college, with each also receiving departmental awards. Four were offered full funding to our graduate program, and three accepted, with the fourth headed to another university. See more about them on my lab webpage: sophon.okstate.edu/people/. 

I had a good time at the Acoustical Society of America conference in Chicago. I participated in an invited panel with my co-author Sara Loss that Ben Munson organized about infusing social justice into acoustics pedagogy. We showed the sad null results we've gotten so far on our quest to find classroom interventions to help undergrads understand international instructors better (both in terms of intelligibility and attitudes). We got some good ideas for next steps, and we're not ready to give up yet (maybe we're measuring something different from what we're affecting). 

I participated in ASHA's Lessons for Success program, a three-day intensive grant-prep workshop.  Their Pathways program was similar a few years ago, with a focus on writing your first grant. LfS focuses on the grant-review process, including mock reviews of participants' past unfunded grants - very useful experience! I also enjoyed getting to know my colleague Roha better, as we flew together and got rerouted to avoid storms coming back. 

Seven of my students presented four posters at the OSU Undergraduate Research Symposium: two from my Deaf Experience, Deaf Expression (DXDX) Project, one from a project on word gender, and one for her senior thesis. See more on these projects on my lab site: sophon.okstate.edu/projects

My paper with my former student Molly Landers (now a PhD student at Michigan State) has been accepted to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Prague this August! It outlines several Possible back prelateral mergers in Oklahoma: drive.google.com/file/d/1VSuH59qlgsj91ejQpU-nigIXuS-s6Mj8/view?usp=share_link. 

My latest paper on the bag-beg-vague merger in the Pacific Northwest has been accepted to the Journal of Phonetics!  The title explains: Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices. I've been considering ways to compare the two types of data for a long time, so I'm very pleased with this one. Special thanks to Santiago Barreda for the direction on confusion matrices (and bootstrapping confidence intervals on stats that don't normally provide things like p-values). 

I taught a full-day minicourse/workshop at the Linguistic Society of America conference in Denver last week. A good group of grad students and faculty attended; we walked through various methods of remote sociophonetic data collection and discussed their really interesting project ideas. My co-author Sara Loss also gave a talk on our project about supporting better communication between undergrads and international students, TAs, and faculty. It was great to see so many old friends and colleagues, and the American Dialect Society Word of the Year was quite amusing this year!