Our grad programs offer rigorous academic training that prepares you for a career in academia and in industry linguistics careers at companies such as Amazon and M*Modal. Below are profiles of some of our recent alumni.
Featured Alumni
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Alumni Profile: Angela K. Swain
Angela Krak Swain (right) received her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics in 2023. She now works as an Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish at Penn State University (University Park), teaching undergraduate language and linguistics courses. Angela is also a faculty leader for a Penn State summer study abroad program in Cádiz, Spain.
"One of the strengths of Pitt’s Linguistics program is that it inherently prepares students for a variety of careers post-graduation. In my case, I wanted to pursue a predominantly teaching-oriented position that also had opportunities to conduct research. My professors knew this and helped me develop the skills I would need to be competitive in the job market. Students in the Hispanic Linguistics track begin teaching Spanish classes immediately, so by the end of the program, I had independently taught a wide range of language and content courses. Simultaneously, I worked with faculty members on my own research projects and also on ones that I was invited to as a collaborator, gaining valuable experience in experiment building, academic writing, data analysis, and conducting international research. Lastly, the collaborative spirit of the program is truly special; faculty always had their doors open to listen to our ideas, regardless of whether a student was their advisee. There are plenty of opportunities for students to excel, and everyone’s success was celebrated with Department-wide happy hours after defenses and presentations. This combination of high-quality, specialized training and an emphasis on genuine collaboration is one that I am very grateful for, and I continue to rely on the skills I honed at Pitt in my current position."
Alumni Profile: Juan Berríos
Juan Berríos (left) received his PhD in Hispanic Linguistics in 2023. He is now Assistant Professor of Spanish at California State University, Fresno, where he teaches courses on linguistics, language acquisition, and translation and interpreting at the graduate and undergraduate level.
Juan writes:
“From my first interaction with the faculty and students, I could tell that Pitt Linguistics was a nurturing community that valued collegiality just as much as academic rigor. In this sense, one of the graduate program’s greatest strengths is the depth of expertise among the faculty across a wide variety of areas, which allows students to fully explore all linguistics has to offer as a discipline. Just as importantly, their doors were always open to discuss everything from class papers to summer projects, and from there sprang collaborations that continue to this day. I remain grateful for those opportunities because they made me a more well-rounded researcher and educator, and I do my best to adopt that same approach in my current role as a student mentor.”
Alumni Profile: Dominique Branson
Dominique Branson (left) received her PhD in Linguistics, concentrating in Sociolinguistics, in 2023. She is now a Soros Justice Fellow at the Open Society Foundations, where she conducts public-facing research on racialized language practices in legal contexts. She also serves as an expert witness in cases involving language and racial discrimination.
"One of the most formative experiences I had at Pitt was the opportunity to teach Aspects of Sociolinguistics independently during my fourth year as a graduate student. Designing and leading a course on my own allowed me to develop a justice-focused teaching pedagogy and kept me engaged in new research as I entered the final stages of the doctoral program. Without the hands-on experience I gained as a sole instructor at Pitt, I likely would not have had the confidence or skills to later serve as a visiting faculty member in the Criminology, Law, and Justice department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. During my time at UIC, I connected with like-minded researchers (faculty and students) who challenged me and helped shape my trajectory. Also, it’s where I first learned about the Soros Justice Fellowship. Few doctoral students are trusted and given the opportunity to teach independently. I am grateful to the Linguistics department at Pitt for making that possible for me."
Alumni Profile: Ben Naismith
Ben Naismith (right) received his PhD in Applied Linguistics in 2022. He is now a Senior Assessment Scientist/Linguist at Duolingo where he works on research and development of the Duolingo English Test. Ben writes:
Without the experience and skills gained during my graduate program, there is absolutely zero chance that I would have been offered, or been able to do, the job I have now. Even more than the classes, what really set me up for success was the hands-on linguistics projects, like developing the Pitt ELI Corpus. Through projects like these I developed skills for doing corpus and computational linguistics work, collaborating with students and faculty, presenting and publishing research findings, and many more. I'll always be grateful that I was extended these opportunities to do impactful work as I transitioned from being a language teacher to an applied linguist.
Alumni Profile: Katherine I. Martin
Associate Profressor Katherine I. Martin (left) with her fellow linguistics faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Katherine I. Martin received her PhD in applied linguistics in 2015. She is now Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she teaches classes that mostly focus on training bilingual and ESL teachers, at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Katherine writes:
“My most memorable - and enduringly useful - experience was really two different things that tie together. First, my experience teaching English as a second language in the English Language Institute (part of Pitt’s Department of Linguistics) sparked my interest in understanding literacy acquisition, which is still my area of research focus today. Second, every time I would come to my advisor Alan Juffs with an idea for a project, he would listen, nodding along, and then ask "But why do I care?" This perspective - of always wanting the research to have some specific, real-world application, fundamentally shaped the way I think about the work that I do. The opportunity to use my real-life experiences to inspire my research, and use my research to have real-life impacts, is probably the most influential (and memorable) part of my experience at Pitt.”
Alumni Profile: Noriyasu Li
Noriyasu Harada Li (pictured second from the left) is a Director of AI and Machine Learning Engineering at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he leads the strategy, architecture, and delivery of enterprise AI platforms that power content authoring and document automation across the organization. His work focuses on building generative AI solutions, including LLMs, RAG-based systems, and AI governance capabilities, to accelerate complex scientific and regulatory workflows.
Previously he was a Principal Product Manager at Moderna, working on AI and digital platforms across global marketing, translation, localization, and eCommerce. Prior to that, he was at Zoom leading machine transcription and machine translation technologies, and he started his industry career at Amazon as a language engineer developing ASR and NLU language models for Alexa in Japanese. He received his PhD in Linguistics in 2017 from the University of Pittsburgh. During his PhD studies, he conducted research on SLA, syntax, L2 phonological acquisition, L2 orthographic knowledge and writing development, and acquisition of tense/aspect in Japanese.
Nori writes:
"I've been fortunate to build a career across tech and life sciences industries, working at the intersection of AI and language. No matter where I've been, I continue to draw on the knowledge and skills I developed in graduate school every day - a mindset of continuous learning, ability to communicate and conceptualize complex problems, and an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI in language have been valuable throughout every stage in my career. I never imagined I'd end up leading AI products and engineering teams, but the technical foundation, research experience, and analytical thinking I developed as a linguist have shaped how I approach building AI systems and leading teams. You never know where your career will take you, and that's part of what makes it exciting."
Alumni Profile: Adrienne Washington
Adrienne Washington recieved her PhD in 2016 and is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at West Virginia University. She teaches several courses on Language & Society, where students explore language use at its intersections with different aspects of social life, including thought, mass news media, politics, race and ethnicity, gender and sex. Her research specializes in sociocultural linguistics with a particular focus on the use of language within education, for identity work, and for meaning making within black communities of the U.S. and Brazil. She was just quoted in this NYT article discussing pandemic nicknaming.
Adrienne writes:
"The linguistics program at Pitt encourages and often even requires students to complete their coursework and training with professors whose work explores distinct dimensions of language. Thus, while the program provides students with a strong foundation in the principal areas of linguistics, my training has also equipped me to comprehensively study language as a historical, anthropological, sociological, sociocultural, and educational phenomenon and to understand the value of an integrative education. My diverse linguistics graduate training has furthermore empowered me to explore the complex and intersectional themes, such as language use vis-à -vis race, nationhood, gender, inequality, and education, fields that I currently research and teach."
Alumni Profile: Héctor Ramírez-Cruz
Héctor Ramírez-Cruz (right) pictured with Professor Hubert Devonish at the 21st Conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics in Jamaica.
Hector Ramirez Cruz received his PhD in Hispanic Linguistics in 2017. He is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he teaches courses in linguistics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Hector is passionate about linguistics and how people make sense of their lives through language, discourse, and narratives.
He writes:
“I loved the social part of studying at Pitt. I remembered when meeting with classmates and sometimes professors at Hemingways to celebrate a paper defense or informal social meetings to open or close an academic term either on campus, in Schenley Park, or at a professor or classmate's home. These were opportunities to approach people from other perspectives, develop a warming environment, and foster a sense of community in the program.”
Alumni Profile: Lauren Collister
Lauren Collister (left) meeting at Rep Mike Doyle's office in Washington D.C. to advocate for public access to research data. Lauren Collister received her PhD in Sociolinguistics in 2013. Lauren is currently Engagement Coordinator at Infrastructure. She was previously Director, Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing at the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. She oversees the journal publishing, self-archiving repositories, open access education, electronic theses and dissertations, and copyright work for the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh.
Lauren writes:
“The practice of being a scholar has been valuable for this position because I know something of what scholars go through when publishing and trying to share their work. Working on papers and trying to publish them as well as presenting at conferences prepared me more for this position than any formal education that I had. The obstacles to finding and sharing research work became evident to me during the course of my graduate work, and often got in the way of some of the things I wanted to do with my research and projects. That instilled in me a strong sense of the need for better systems and better laws to protect and help scholars as creators of knowledge.”
Alumni Profile: Hillary Schepps
Hillary Schepps received the MA in Applied Linguistics (SLA) and TESOL Certificate in 2014. She is currently Director of studies and co-owner of Intuition, a language school in Bologna, Italy. Hillary writes:
"My linguistics graduate work included not only the MA and TESOL certificate but also a teaching assistantship at the English Language Institute. Teaching at the ELI while I earned my degree allowed me to put theory into practice, instantly verifying the utility of everything I was studying. It also helped me generate research questions about L1 influence on EFL development which ultimately became the topic of my thesis and is still a critical consideration in my current role. A lot of the courses required for TESOL are directly applicable to my current position: Materials, Assessment, Linguistic Structures of English, and so on. In fact, I apply the principles I learned at Pitt on a daily basis. Just this morning I referred to Bloom’s taxonomy when justifying to a client why a student’s level of English isn’t quite as high as she maintained!"
Alumni Profile: Roberto Aranovich
Roberto Aranovich received his PhD in 2011 and is now Senior Voice User Interface/Speech Designer (Spanish) at Versay Solutions. Previously, he was Senior Associate Development Manager at M*Modal, a company that provides medical speech recognition, medical transcription, CDI, and coding.
Roberto writes context-free grammars used to parse clinical documents. This is a necessary step in order to allow the M*Modal system to understand the documents and extract discrete information from them. The information is later used to support reasoning systems that produce alerts and summarize the information for doctors.
Roberto writes:
“My graduate studies prepared me for my position by providing me with a deep understanding of the core structure of language as well as the fact that language is intrinsically variable and that the answer to linguistic questions are basically empirical.”