Humanities Alumni Spotlight:

Alumna Makes Our Lives Easier

Ever wonder who creates the telephone applications that enable us, for example, to order movie tickets or pizza, get the latest on the weather or the stock market? You can thank Elizabeth Strand (M.A. and Ph.D., Linguistics) for making these everyday tasks easy. Strand is Manager of User Interface Design in the Creative Services team at Tellme Networks, Inc., which provides the world’s largest network for accessing Internet content over the phone.

Strand, who earned a B.A. in English at the University of Minnesota, works with client business and technology teams to determine system requirements, and then various engineering groups and audio producers to create the end-product. "I work on everything from designing speech recognition systems that maximize ease-of-use by incorporating patterns of natural language discourse, to making computer speech synthesizers sound more like real human speakers, which ultimately makes it easier for listeners to understand the speech that’s being synthesized."

Originally planning to teach at the college level, Strand says that working on interesting speech technology products in OSU's Linguistics Lab and the burgeoning speech technology industry while she was in school helped redirect her goals: "My job involves a combination of design, technology, and management, which allows me to mix my earlier interests in teaching and advising with my core interests in linguistics and language-related technology."

Strand says she was fortunate to work with a "great constellation of professors in the Linguistics Department," Mary Beckman, Beth Hume-O’Haire, Keith Johnson (now at UC Berkeley), and Don Winford: "Their varying perspectives developed my cross-linguistic interests in the sounds, perception, and use of language in a social context."

After graduating in 2000, Strand's first job was designing voice user interfaces at Nuance Communications in Menlo Park, California. She says, "My humanities background enables me to interact with the most technically-oriented engineers and coders, to very creative interaction designers, to bottom-line-oriented corporate executives."

Strand lives in San Francisco with her husband Frederick Parkinson (OSU M.A. and Ph.D., Linguistics) and 3 cats: "We enjoy all that beautiful Northern California affords us – including hiking, biking, running, kayaking, camping, and beach combing along the ocean." She also gardens and volunteers with "The Greenway Project" which transforms public utility right-of-way space in disadvantaged San Francisco neighborhoods into urban gardens.