About

Dr. Wan’s academic journey began in 1990, when she worked part-time in the Molecular Beam Epitaxy laboratory of the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, assisting with financial reporting and administrative coordination for research projects funded by the National Science Council, while still an undergraduate in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. Although she was then pursuing her undergraduate degree in Foreign Languages and Literature, her early exposure to empirical research and data-intensive experimentation in the MBE lab fostered a scientific mindset that would later shape her trajectory in language science. This formative experience cultivated her interest in the intersection of empirical methods, data modeling and human language, guiding her toward a career that integrates experimental and corpus phonology, psycholinguistics, data science and computational modeling. This early engagement with lab-oriented research laid a strong foundation for her interdisciplinary approach to linguistics and cognitive science, which would later inform her doctoral studies. ed research laid a strong foundation for her interdisciplinary approach to linguistics and cognitive science, which would later inform her doctoral studies.

Building on this interdisciplinary foundation, Dr. Wan later directed the Phonetics Lab, which she expanded into the Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Lab. While serving as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, she audited courses taught by Dr. Kenneth Stevens at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and participated in recording sessions at his Speech Communication Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering. This experience provided her with foundational exposure to acoustic-phonetic modeling and deepened her understanding of naturalistic speech communication from both cognitive and computational perspectives. During this time, she also had the opportunity to engage with Dr. Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, whose work on prosodic structure and speech planning further shaped her approach to spontaneous speech data. Alongside theoretical insights drawn from the work of Dr. Louis Goldstein on articulatory phonology, these experiences collectively motivated her to develop automatically annotated spoken corpora and implement data-driven pipelines for advanced speech analysis. 

Over the past 25 years, Dr. Wan has led the Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Laboratory in building several spoken corpora in Mandarin. These include data-driven speech interactions among multiple speakers, conversations between speech therapists and Mandarin aphasic patients, language acquisition patterns in typically developing children aged 7 months to 6 years, and speech data from children with language disorders aged 3 to 6 years. In recent years, her work has expanded to constructing a diverse collection of annotated speech corpora in Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Czech, and Slovak, extending the cross-linguistic scope of the laboratory. By applying acoustic profiling and emotion detection techniques, Dr. Wan advances research in elementary mathematics education and doctor–patient communication, drawing on psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and applied AI to tackle real-world challenges in education and clinical communication.