This fall, we are excited to share that a number of our graduate students have received prestigious honors and grants, both from within the university and externally.
PhD Candidate Mingyue Huo has received the Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship. This fellowship helps outstanding Illinois graduate students to complete their doctoral degrees. Mingyue is receiving this award for her dissertation research, "Human-Aligned Robust Speech Understanding in Multi-Talker Environments," under the direction of Yan Tang. This research addresses the classic "cocktail party problem" by bridging auditory science and machine learning. By incorporating human perceptual insights, such as how listeners process word meaning and speech cues, into computational models, it aims to build speech recognition and enhancement systems that are significantly more robust in noisy, multi-speaker environments.
PhD Student Elif Varlik has received the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2027 Distinguished Service and Engaged Research Graduate Student Award. This award is given to graduate students whose service and engaged research endeavors promote the interests of traditionally underrepresented or minoritized groups in the field of applied linguistics, raise public awareness of important social issues connected to language, and increase the opportunities for collaboration and dialogue.
Elif Varlik has also received the 2026 Immigrant Welcome Awards Student Leadership Award. This local award recognizes the contributions of individuals and organizations that have created a welcoming atmosphere for immigrants in the Champaign-Urbana community. The awards ceremony will be held Saturday, September 19th, at 1:30pm at the Urbana Free Library.
PhD Candidate Paul de Nijs has received the Language Learning Dissertation Grant This program, sponsored by Language Learning, is aimed at facilitating the research work of doctoral candidates in the language sciences. Paul's research, under the supervision of Dr. SIlvina Montrul, investigates the role of literacy in the development of complex morphosyntax in Spanish speakers, exploring how different patterns of linguistic input shape grammatical development.
PhD Candidate Amelia Tighe also received the Language Learning Dissertation Grant. Her research, under the supervision of Dr. Tania Ionin, examines how multiple factors - including verb-type prosody, and subject weight - affect the acquisition of word order in English and Spanish.
Congratulations to all of these award winners!
