International Speech Communication Association - member of the ISCA Board (treasurer, 2007-)
ISCA SynSIG - Special Interest Group on Speech Synthesis (chairman, 2002-2005)
Speech Communication (subject editor)
Computer Speech and Language (editorial board member)

In January 2007 I received a Humboldt Honorary Research Fellowship (equivalent of Humboldt-Forschungspreis) awarded by the Foundation for Polish Science. This fellowship has since supported my collaboration with Prof. Grazyna Demenko, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznan, Poland.

Professional Background

October 2007 - September 2010: Acting chair of Phonetics and Speech Communication at the University of Bonn.
In December 2007 I received the offer ("Ruf") to take the chair of phonetics and speech communication at the University of Bonn, which I accepted in February 2008 ("Rufannahme"). The formal appointment was canceled when the university decided to abandon the program in Phonetics and Computational Linguistics.

I joined the Institute of Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart in 1999. In the division of Experimental Phonetics I do research in the fields of speech production and perception, prosody, speech synthesis, and computational phonology and morphology, and I teach courses on these subjects.

In May 2001 I was appointed as Associate Professor (Hochschuldozent) at the IMS. Habilitation in Phonetics and Computational Linguistics (December 2000); title of the habilitation thesis: "German and multilingual speech synthesis", published in AIMS 7 (4). In April 2007 I was awarded the title of professor (außerplanmäßiger Professor).

From 1993 to 1998 I was a research scientist in Joe Olive's speech synthesis group (Linguistics / Language Modeling Dept.) at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, USA, where I built the Bell Labs German text-to-speech (TTS) system. Research activities in multilingual TTS included linguistic text analysis, prosodic modeling, the design of acoustic unit inventories and the improvement of voice quality. [my old BL-TTS home page]

From 1987 to 1993 I was a researcher at the Institute of Communication Research and Phonetics (IKP), University of Bonn, Germany.

I received M.A. and Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) degrees in Communication Research and Phonetics, Linguistics, and Sociology from the University of Bonn. My Ph.D. thesis "A quantitative model of German intonation - Analysis and synthesis of fundamental frequency contours" (in German) includes an application of Hiroya Fujisaki's intonation model to German; it was published in 1993 as a book by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen. My adviser was Wolfgang Hess.