Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel is a Principal Research Scientist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology RLE Speech Communication Group.  She received her doctorate from MIT with a thesis on speech error patterns and what they reveal about the cognitive representations and processing mechanisms that underlie speech production planning.  The question of what we can learn about modelling cognitive processing from close analysis of spontaneous speech behavior has guided her subsequent work in systematic context-governed phonetic variation, speech prosody, co-speech gesture and the phonology-phonetic interface in production, perception and learning/development.  It has led to her collaborative involvement in the development of a variety of phonological and phonetic annotation tools and processing models, including ToBI and PoLaR for spoken prosody, M3D for co-speech gesture, the LEXI system for annotating individual acoustic cues to phonological contrasts, and the Prosody First and XT/3C models of speech production planning. 

Oliver Niebuhr is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), where he directs the Acoustics Laboratory at the Centre for Industrial Electronics. His research explores how prosody and nonverbal communication patterns in general shape and define perceived speaker traits, human behavior and biosignals, and human–machine interaction. Niebuhr’s projects span from the fundamentals of intonation and voice quality to highly applied topics such as acoustically based public-speaker training, hate-speech perception, prosody in second-language learning, and speech-based human–robot interaction. His innovations include the Acoustic Voice Profiling technology, which won the BHJ Innovation Prize 2018 and led to the creation of the speech-technology startup AllGoodSpeakers ApS that co-founded since then Niebuhr leads as CEO. He also co-developed VR tools for presentation training and sensor-based systems for studying posture, jaw movements, breathing, and speech under stress.

Beyond his R&D work, Niebuhr serves as Executive Secretary of the International Phonetic Association, Associate Editor of Phonetica and the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, and has hosted several international conferences, including the inaugural International Conference of Tone and Intonation (TAI 2021), The Nordic Prosody Conference 2023, and IEEE Professional Communication Conference 2025.