About us

Vincent's research interests lie in forensic speech science, phonetics, phonology, sociophonetics and sociolinguistics. His current research focuses on understanding the bases and limitations of individual speaker characterisation and the relative contribution of acoustic, auditory and biological information. He is also interested in the application of the numerical likelihood ratio framework to the evaluation of speech evidence in forensic voice comparison cases.

Paul's research interests are in language variation and change, phonetics, phonology, sociophonetics, first language acquisition and forensic speech science. Most of his work focuses on quantitative analysis of natural speech, with a view to understanding systematic phonetic variation and its implications for phonological and linguistic theory. 

Philip’s research interests are in forensic speech science, acoustic phonetics, signal processing and acoustics. His research is informed by his extensive experience as a forensic scientist at J P French Associates, Forensic Speech and Acoustics Laboratory, where he carried out casework for over 20 years across a range of areas including speaker comparison, authentication, enhancement, transcription and sound source determination.

Chenzi is finishing her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil thesis examines the prosodic patterns of unstressed syllables in Mandarin accents. Using quantitative modelling methods, it focuses on the characteristics of pitch and rhythm variation, and captures structured variation in pitch with regard to linguistic contexts, information structure, and social identity in speech. Her research interests are phonetics, phonology, language variation, and speech technology.

Jessica's research interests are in forensic speech science, phonetics, phonology and sociophonetics. Her PhD investigated the development of contact varieties in the two British cities Bradford and Leicester, analysing speech using auditory, acoustic, automatic and articulatory methods. She has worked for six years as a consultant at J P French Associates where she specialised in forensic speaker comparison and transcription.

Poppy’s research interests are in speech and language technology, in particular in automatic speech and speaker recognition, natural language processing and speech synthesis. The research she carried out during her MSc investigated the joint modelling of automatic speaker verification and spoofing countermeasure systems.

D.L. (David) van der Vloed MA is a forensic speech researcher and practitioner with a background in phonetics and sociolinguistics at NFI (Netherlands Forensic Institute) . He has more than 12 years of casework experience and has worked on hundreds of cases. As a researcher he has built the NFI-FRITS and NFI-FRIDA collections, each containing a large set of forensically realistic data. With those, he performed validation research on automatic speaker recognition methods, which resulted in implementation of automatic speaker recognition in NFI casework in 2019

Finnian is Principal Research Scientist at Oxford Wave Research (OWR). Finnian leads the Research & Development (R&D) team at OWR, who explore and refine new solutions to real-world problems in automatic speaker recognition, speech and speaker analysis, and audio processing. As well as informing the development of new and improved software tools at OWR, Finnian and the R&D team regularly publish and present their research at scientific conferences. Finnian also delivers bespoke technical training courses and consultations on forensic automatic speaker recognition to law enforcement, government, and academic institutions internationally. Prior to joining Oxford Wave Research in 2016 as a Senior Research Scientist, Finnian was with the Sigmedia Research Group at Trinity College Dublin, where he completed his PhD in 2013, and the Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS) at The University of Texas at Dallas, with whom he maintains research collaborations.