Meet the LingComm25 Organising Committee

Sharon Unsworth is a language scientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands where she studies the language development of bilingual children. Her adventures in SciComm started in 2007 with talks for parents and teachers and since then she’s created and hosted a podcast about bilingual children, Kletsheads, and co-founded Kletskoppen, a festival for children all about language and language science, of which she is currently scientific director. When she’s not doing linguistics or SciComm, she loves to bake, sew and swim. You can find her elsewhere on the internet here.

Charlotte Vaughn is Assistant Research Professor in the Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. She is the founder and director of the Language Science Station, a pop-up research and engagement lab housed at Planet Word museum. Her research focuses on the cognitive side of sociolinguistics, especially perception, and she has been involved in public engagement around language in some form since 2005. She enjoys making things, playing board games, and being outside. You can find her elsewhere on the internet here.

Marten van der Meulen has been doing lingcomm since 2013. He started with blogging, but has since branched out into many different forms, most prominently writing several lingcomm books in Dutch. Marten wrote a PhD thesis on Dutch prescriptivism, and now combines his job as a policy advisor on Dutch with freelance work as a science communicator. His hobbies include reading feminist sci-fi dystopias and baking blue pancakes with his son. You can find him elsewhere on the internet here.

Daniel Midgley is a cohost of the Because Language podcast (becauselanguage.com). He has extensive media experience in podcasting and live radio. He also teaches linguistics at the University of Western Australia. He’s @becauselangpod in most places, but you can find also find him here.

Pietra Cassol Rigatti has been in love with psycholinguistics since 2016. She has studied working memory, bilingualism, and word recognition in Brazilian Portuguese, English, and Haitian Creole. In 2019, she started creating posts and videos on Instagram about the wonders of linguistics, because it’s everywhere all at once! In her free time, she likes to crochet, read and watch sci-fi with her husband, play with her cats, and find connections between pop culture and linguistics. You can find her elsewhere on the internet here.

Mikī Gulēna-Taube (conference manager) is a research master’s student in Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, researching and writing mostly on queer sociolinguistics, Latvian language and culture, and diaspora. Her science bachelor’s at McMaster University helped spark an interest in exploring SciComm—and now, lingcomm—as a tool to bridge academic research and the public. In her free time, she sings in a Latvian choir, leads a Latvian youth folk dance group, and watches the worst reality shows on Netflix with her friends.