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.

The IPA PhD Thesis Award Committee is happy to announce the winner of the IPA Thesis Award 2024: Simona Sbranna, from the University of Cologne, with a thesis titled 'Developing linguistic competence in second language learning: Fluency and prosody in Italian learners of German’.

The applications submitted for the first edition of the IPA PhD Thesis Award were of very high quality, and thus the task of the committee was extremely difficult. We congratulate the winner and all the other applicants for the high standards achieved.

The IPA invites applications for a new student mobility programme. Awards will be funded for up to 1500€ each; the number of awards will depend on the budget.

The programme will support physical mobility of IPA student members to visit research laboratories with expertise in their area of study. It subsidizes travel or accommodation costs for a minimum two-week mobility to the host institution. It is primarily addressed to student members from countries where funding resources are limited. The primary goal is to provide the opportunity to students to visit a research laboratory abroad in order to conduct a specific, well-defined project (which may be a pilot project). The program will benefit students by allowing them to meet other researchers and build academic networks, acquiring knowledge and skills on the use of new experimental techniques and data analysis methods, presenting their own work to a broader audience, exchanging knowledge and ideas on common research areas. It will also promote future collaborations across different laboratories and countries.

The deadline for applications is February 15th, 2025.
The mobility should be completed by December 15, 2025.

Eligibility

Current graduate student members of the Association are eligible to apply for the student mobility program. Priority will be given to students from countries where funding resources are limited.

The candidates should submit:

• A two-page CV
• A one-page summary of their research project
• A one-page motivation letter including justification for the visit, the expected learning outcomes and how the mobility will add value to their research
• A preliminary breakdown of the costs, including information on whether other funding applications
  were submitted and amount applied for

These four documents should be submitted as a single pdf file. In addition, they should also submit:

• A letter of support (PDF) by the supervisor setting out the objectives of the mobility and how it will
  benefit the candidate
• A letter of acceptance (PDF) by the host institution with the proposed dates of the visit (minimum 2 weeks).

Applications for IPA membership can be lodged via our website here. A full list of member benefits can be found on the same page. To apply for an Award, eligible members of the IPA should log in to the website with their membership details, fill in the application form and upload all documents to the application form here.

Upon completion of the visit, students are asked to send photographs and a short video describing the visit, the research carried out, and benefits of the programme. This material will be posted on the IPA social media.

Two student members have received IPA Student Awards for their participation at ISAPh 2024, the 5th International Symposium on Applied Phonetics, 30 Sept. - 2 October, in Tartu, Estonia. They are:

• Yixuan Huang (Waseda University, Japan)
• Lingyun Gao (Radboud University, the Netherlands)

Congratulations to the awardees!

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