Jennifer Cole is a professor in Linguistics at Northwestern University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan (1982, 1983) and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from M.I.T. (1987), and was on the faculty at Yale University (Linguistics, 1987-1989) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Linguistics and Cognitive Science, 1990-2016) prior to joining Northwestern in 2016. She served as elected chair of the AAAS Section Z [Linguistics and Language Science], on the National Research Council Board on Behavioral, Cognitive & Sensory Sciences, on the Board of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America. Dr. Cole served as the founding editor for the journal Laboratory Phonology (2000-2005), and on the editorial boards for Language, Phonology, and the Oxford Research Reviews in Linguistics. Dr. Cole’s research focuses on prosody and its role in conveying information about linguistic structure, pragmatic meaning, speaker emotion, and the dynamics of social interaction. She has pioneered methods of prosodic annotation for large speech databases using crowd-sourcing. Her work combines experimental methods with large-scale observational analyses of natural interactions, in English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, and many other languages, using computational and statistical modeling with acoustic and behavioral data.
