Vita

Voice-Comparison.com was founded after sucessful completion of my dissertation in phonetics in 2005 as an office for forensic phonetics and has been working continuously and full time since then.

Since 2018 I serve as Adjunct Assistant, since 2023 as Adjunct Associate Professor at The University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC). In 2023 I was nominated for the Stanley J. Drazek Teaching Excellence Award.

I began my professional career as an expert witness for speaker comparison and voice analyses after a graduate program in phonetics which led to my doctoral thesis on vocal stress parameters in language and voice among police officers. I was supported by the German Bundeskriminalamt, the Hessian Police University of Applied Sciences as well as the German GSG9, a special police unit (S.W.A.T.).

Voice Comparison.com has defined a concept for an automatic speaker recognition system originally customized to my needs for voice comparison work in Germany. Based on the German StPO (Code of Criminal Procedure), which requires the expert witness to explain the specialized aspects of a scientific report in a court room, so the court is able to base its decision on comprehensible and conclusive expert testimony, VOCALISE became an Open-Box-Architecture System. I wanted automatic speaker recognition to be understandable for a speech scientist, and I wanted to be able to adjust the system to the requirements of my specific casework. This became the foundation for its international acceptance. With the British company Oxford Wave Research a system was developed and programmed which has become known as VOCALISE (Voice Comparison and the Analysis of the Likelihood of Speech Evidence), and was presented for the first time at the IAFPA conference in Tampa, Florida in 2013. Today, VOCALISE is under the independent care of Oxford Wave Research and is among the systems that are internationally known in the field of forensic speech science. It is developed further in partnerships with universities and police units. VOCALISE is used if the recording characteristics are suitable for automatic analyses and it is used in combination with the classical auditory and acoustic components of a forensic report.

Prior to my career as an expert witness I earned a Master´s degree which qualified me to work as a speech-language pathologist (speech and voice disorders in adults) in a supervisory position and as a lecturer at a university of applied sciences.

I was certified to teach German as a Second Language. In the language teaching activities that I have conducted over several years I have gained experience in second language acquisition patterns and processes based on the various foreign languages that are spoken in Germany today.

During my student years I acquired experience in working with acoustic phonetics internationally e.g. in the United States and England. Here I also learned most of the auditory skills necessary for analyses and transcriptions of the sounds of the world´s languages.

In 1998 I became a student member, in 2003 Full Member of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA)

I was able to publish and hold seminars on forensics. International relations and research grants enabled me to work, live, and do research in several countries.