Meet the team

Mark Hasegawa-Johnsonis a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has devoted his 30-plus-year career to developing communication tools and technologies and ensuring their accessibility for everyone. His research focuses on automatic speech recognition, and he is the lead researcher of the Speech Accessibility Project, a multi-year initiative that aims to improve voice-recognition technology by collecting audio samples from volunteers with a variety of speech-impacted disabilities. Hasagawa-Johnson earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was recently named a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association.

Heejin Kim is a research assistant professor of the Department of Linguistics. She has conducted research on the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of dysarthric speech. She is particularly interested in how to improve human listeners’ and machines’ understanding of atypical speech produced by people with motor speech disorders. As a Co-PI in the Speech Accessibility Project, she directs speech material selection procedures and text annotation tasks.

Clarion Mendes is a speech-language pathologist and a clinical associate professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her M.A. in speech-language pathology from UIUC and brings 14 years of SLP experience to the Speech Accessibility Project team. Mendes’s rich clinical and teaching portfolio includes health equity, treatment protocols for gender-diverse individuals seeking voice modification, and quality of life improvements for individuals with acquired communication disorders and differences. She is a member of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and is OutCare Health certified.

Chris Zwilling is the Speech Accessibility Project’s program manager and also serves as the assistant director for the NSF Science and Technology Center for Quantitative Cell Biology. He has worked at the Beckman Institute since 2016. He has published many scientific papers and has led multiple large-scale research projects. Chris manages all aspects of the Speech Accessibility Project, including submitting the project’s research protocol to the University of Illinois’ Institutional Review Board, meeting with the project’s many partners, and reporting back to the consortium funding the project, including Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google.

Jenna Kurtzweil manages media relations and news for the Beckman Institute and the Speech Accessibility Project. She connects reporters with researchers, participants, partners, and information about the project.

Meg Dickinson leads marketing and communications at the Beckman Institute and assists with recruitment on the Speech Accessibility Project. Her role includes overseeing recruitment strategy, producing recruitment materials for the project, and managing the project’s newsletter (sign up here). Meg started her career as a print journalist and earned a master’s degree at the University of Illinois’ School of Information Sciences.