People

faculty

In the 2025-26 year, The LoL is run by manager Wren Arbor and lab assistants Ezra Scheuermann, Rowan Horowitz, Rives Scherer under the direction of Sameer ud Dowla Khan. The team can be reached at laboflinguistics@reed.edu, or via our personal reed emails.

Wren Arbor

she/her
LoL Manager

Email: dylanking@reed.edu

Wren is a senior linguistics major focused on sociolinguistics and also interested in phonetics, minoring in Chinese. She's interested in the ways in which the world is created by language. Methodologically, she's most familiar with elicitations with speakers for language documentation (learned from taking phonetics and field methods), and sociolinguistic methods.

Faculty and Staff

The faculty and staff who you might see hanging around the LoL include the following:

Kara Becker

Professor of Linguistics

Kara particularly enjoys taking formant measurements in Praat, especially when you have to adjust the formant settings for each vowel. Here we see her with the LoL's youngest participant. His neck was unfortunately too narrow to strap the electroglottograph on.

Sameer ud Dowla Khan

Professor of Linguistics

Sameer is responsible for overseeing the procurement and maintenance of equipment. He enjoys reading spectrograms and drawing them by hand as secret messages. Here he is demonstrating the movement of the vocal folds during voicing.

Matt Pearson

Professor of Linguistics

Matt enjoys listening to recordings of Field Methods consultants and trying to work out if they’re producing a low tone or a downstepped tone. He doesn’t use the equipment in the LoL very much, but he sleeps better at night knowing it’s there.

Research Assistants

The following students worked as research assistants (RAs) for faculty-led research projects:

Manamaya Peterson '19 is a recent Reed graduate, and worked as a Post-Bacc Research Assistant with Kara Becker on the Reed Linguistic Diversity Project which was funded by a Spencer Foundation grant. She loves to travel and enjoys music, singing, dancing, and doing creative projects!

Tiffany Chang '20 is a recent Reed graduate and was a Research Assistant with Kara Becker and Manamaya Peterson on the Reed Linguistic Diversity Project (Hear Me Hoot!), funded by a Spencer Foundation grant. She loves to do insensible DIY, cook her cultural dishes, draw, and watch movies in her spare time.

Sophia Kongshaug '20 is a recent Reed graduate and research assistant for Sameer ud Dowla Khan. She enjoys reading spectrograms, taking notes in IPA, and participating in the cot-caught merger.

M Stoddard '19 (he/she/they) is a recent alum working as a research assistant for Sameer ud Dowla Khan to investigate the relationship between creaky voice and sex, gender, and sexuality. They particularly like finding creaky voice on a spectrogram and writing scripts in Praat.

Cecilia Bahls '20 is a recent Reed graduate and research assistant for Sameer ud Dowla Khan. She is from Washington state, and she likes vowels, variation, and napping.