The IPA is saddened to note the passing of Christine Helen Shadle, an internationally respected speech scientist and a leading authority on the acoustics and production of fricatives. She died in New Haven, Connecticut, on 24 January 2026, shortly before her seventy-second birthday. She was born in Pasadena, California, on 6 February 1954 and grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Christine's career united two interests that remained central throughout her life: engineering and music. She completed a double major in Electrical Engineering and Music, with a focus on piano performance, at Stanford University in 1976. Following two years at Bell Laboratories, she undertook doctoral research at MIT under Kenneth Stevens. Her PhD, completed in 1985, investigated the acoustics of speech production, particularly fricatives—a subject that would occupy her for the next four decades.

Hunt and NATO postdoctoral fellowships took her to the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton and subsequently to KTH in Stockholm. She later joined Southampton’s Department of Electronics and Computer Science and spent part of 1995 as an invited researcher at ATR in Kyoto. In 2004, she moved to Haskins Laboratories in New Haven as a Senior Research Scientist. From 2023, she also held an appointment as a research scientist in the Yale Child Study Center.

Christine made distinctive contributions by connecting the physical mechanisms of speech production with their observable acoustic consequences. Her research combined aerodynamic theory, mechanical and acoustic modelling, detailed spectral analysis, and MRI-derived representations of the vocal tract. She greatly advanced understanding of how fricative noise is generated, shaped by vocal-tract geometry, and modified by voicing, place of articulation, and vowel context. Her later work refined acoustic measures for fricatives and questioned established methods of analysing spectra, formants, and resonances. Her scientific interests also extended to electrolaryngeal speech, speech following glossectomy, articulatory timing, and the acoustics of the operatic singing voice.

Christine was a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Editorial Board of ASA Press, and a member of the IPA since 2014. An accomplished pianist and choral singer, she was deeply involved in the New Haven Oratorio Choir and the Unitarian Society of New Haven. She is survived by her husband, Andrew Currie, and her sister Paula.

A gifted scientist and musician, and a much-loved colleague, Christine is greatly missed.