Ebony Pearson is a Ph.D. candidate in Peabody Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, specializing in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience. She is a researcher in the Communication and Language Lab (CaLL), where she works under the mentorship of Dr. Duane Watson. Her research focuses on speech perception, dialect variation, and lexical processing, exploring how listeners make sense of spoken language across accents and dialects, and what those patterns reveal about language processing in the mind.
Ebony also brings this research into the world of applied speech technology through her work at SRI’s Speech Technology and Research Lab. She was selected for an NIJ-funded project focused on mitigating demographic bias in forensic speaker identification systems. In that role, she helps analyze speech data and examine how annotation labeling, quality review, and evaluation workflows influence system performance across diverse speakers. Her broader goal is to help build language technologies that better reflect the richness of real human speech, especially for voices and communities too often overlooked in standard datasets.
Ebony is passionate about connecting research, technology, and real-world impact. As she completes her doctorate, she is pursuing industry research opportunities in language technology, where she hopes to contribute to systems that are more inclusive, insightful, and human-centered. Outside of research, Ebony enjoys rock climbing, cycling, and working her way toward an ambitious yearly reading goal, usually with her Siamese cat, Finn, close by.
To learn more about Ebony’s background, projects, and professional journey, visit ebonypearson.github.io
