Four student members have received IPA Student Awards for their participation at TAI 2025, the 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation, 16-18 May, 2025, in Herrsching, Germany. They are:

• Maria Lialiou (University of Cologne, Germany)
• Teerawee Sukanchanon (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)
• Zhou Wangqian (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
• Fengyue Zhao (Cornell University, USA)

Congratulations to the awardees!

Committee on Conference Sponsorships and Student Awards: Patrice Beddor, Ioana Chitoran (chair), John Esling, Jonathan Harrington, Katerina Nicolaidis, Masaki Taniguchi

The IPA is co-sponsoring TAI 2025, to be held in Herrsching, Germany, 16-18 May 2025. IPA is offering up to four student awards for 250 € each. Applicants for these Awards must be:

• Sole author, or first and presenting author of an oral or poster presentation accepted by TAI 2025, and
• An eligible student member of the IPA: student member, unemployed member, member under age 35, member from a low-income-level country.

Applications for IPA membership can be lodged via our website here. They need to be submitted at least a week before the deadline for applications for IPA Awards. A full list of member benefits can be found on this page. To apply for an Award, eligible members of the IPA should log in to the website with their membership details and fill in the application form here. Students should upload their submitted abstract and notification of acceptance. The deadline for applications is *March 5, 2025*. The 250 € registration fee will be reimbursed after the completion of the event and upon receipt of confirmation of participation at the conference. This should include a photograph that can be posted on the IPA social media.

We are deeply saddened to inform you of the death of Ian Maddieson. Ian passed away on 2 February 2025 already. His influential work on the typology of sounds, notably the UCLA Phonological Inventory of Languages (UPSID), has significantly advanced our understanding of linguistic diversity. A respected field researcher and theorist, Maddieson contributed significantly to our knowledge of language universals and phonological theory.

His services to the International Phonetic Association were highly valued and will never be forgotten. Ian was a lifetime IPA member, served on both the IPA Council and the Executive Council, and last but not least he was also an editor of JIPA. He leaves behind a rich scholarly legacy.

We will miss him very much!

If you would like to know more about his vita, you will find more information here:
https://lx.berkeley.edu/news/passing-ian-maddieson
https://www.unm.edu/~ianm/

The IPA Executive Council
Katerina Nicolaidis (President),
Sónia Frota,
Oliver Niebuhr,
Marija Tabain,
Ghada Khattab.

Since 2017, the Council of the IPA has established several committees that have taken on some of the tasks of running the Association allowing us to expand what we can do for the field of phonetics. Following seven years of service, the membership of the committees was reviewed in 2024. We would like to thank all outgoing members for their service and welcome the new members and chairpersons.

Below are the committees, their membership, and brief descriptions. Some committees include non-Council members. These are members with previous experience on the committees who have agreed to continue their service or members with expertise on different areas the committees are responsible for. Some committees may be adding more members, including student members.

Alphabet, Charts and Fonts - Adrian Simpson (Chair), Michael Ashby, John Esling, James Kirby, Asher Laufer, Benjamin V. Tucker
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Contact point for proposals for changes to the alphabet or chart; production of IPA charts in various fonts, file formats, and image resolutions; online distribution of these charts; liaison with SIL and Unicode Technical Committee; liaison with International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association; soliciting, vetting, and disseminating IPA charts in languages other than English and tables of correspondences between IPA and non-IPA symbols.

Conference Sponsorships and Student Awards - Ioana Chitoran (chair), Pam Beddor, John Esling, Jonathan Harrington, Katerina Nicolaidis, Masaki Taniguchi
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Policies for conference/workshop sponsorship; evaluation of requests to the IPA for such sponsorship. Guidelines and criteria for evaluating applications for IPA Student Awards and Gösta Bruce travel awards; solicitation and evaluation of applications for these awards. Guidelines and criteria for evaluating applications for student mobility program; solicitation and evaluation of applications for these awards. Determination and management of annual budget for awards.

Education – Patricia Ashby (chair), Maria Maria-Josep Solé
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Educational content of the IPA’s website and other educational outreach to students and teachers of phonetics.
 

History - Michael Ashby (chair), Marc Garellek, Mária Gósy
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History of the Association and its journals, and of phonetics more generally. Liaison with ISCA SIG on History of Speech Communication Research, The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, and with the historical acoustic-phonetics collection (HAPS) at TU Dresden.

PhD Thesis Award - Sónia Frota (co-chair), Martine Grice (co-chair), Taehong Cho, Lisa Davidson, Thais Christofaro Silva, Maria Josep Solé.
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Evaluation of applications to the IPA PhD Thesis Award. The award distinguishes the best PhD Thesis in the broad area of Phonetics, Speech Sciences, and Laboratory Phonology. The prize is awarded annually to a PhD student who has produced an outstanding PhD thesis with substantial academic potential and that contributes to advancing the scientific study of the field.

Phonetic Documentation of Languages – Pat Keating (chair), Marc Garellek, Ailbhe Ni Chasaide, Plinio Barbosa, James Kirby, Alexis Michaud, Janet Fletcher
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Encourage and fund phonetic fieldwork through existing organizations; offer expert advice to fieldworkers; liaison with archives of language materials.

Social Media and Outreach - Mariapaola D’ Imperio (chair), Katerina Nicolaidis, Jane Setter
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Develop our social media, including our website, our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and our presence in Wikipedia, work on content to be posted, especially with a view to outreach to non-members who are interested in phonetics and the IPA.

On January 10, 2025, the IPA Secretary, Oliver Niebuhr, visited the Phonetics Institutes within the Dept. of Linguistics at the University of Cologne (Germany). We are very pleased that we were able to personally present our first winner of the IPA Thesis Award, Simona Sbranna, with her certificate during this meeting. Simona received the award for an impressive thesis on "Developing linguistic competence in second language learning: Fluency and prosody in Italian learners of German."

The photo shows from left to right the IPA Secretary Oliver Niebuhr, the award winner Simona Sbranna (now a postdoc researcher at the Cologne Phonetics Institute), and the director of the Phonetics Lab, Martine Grice.

We are very much looking forward to the new insightful submissions for the 2025 round of the award. The deadline for submitting the PhD thesis and the associated documents will again be in late summer 2025. We will announce it in good time.