Melissa Baese-Berk is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics.
As vice provost for faculty development, Melissa's work focuses broadly on the lifecycle of University faculty and academics, supporting them at all stages and transitions of their careers to help them build and maintain academic excellence, intellectual engagement, and well-being. She leads the University's Faculty Development Program, which offers a range of programming to provide support and skill-building in diverse areas of academics' careers and lives, including the Academic Communicators Network, which helps academics effectively communicate about the impact of their research and scholarship with external audiences. Melissa also oversees leadership development and chair support, faculty awards, recruitment and retention, dual careers, family support, and emeriti programming and resources.
Melissa's research focuses on how people understand, produce, and learn spoken language, with particular attention to second-language acquisition. Using experimental and corpus-based methods, she investigates how cognitive, linguistic, and social factors shape the ways speakers and listeners produce and perceive speech. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
Before joining the University of Chicago in 2023, Melissa was a Professor of Linguistics and the David M. and Nancy L. Petrone Faculty Scholar at the University of Oregon, where she also served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. She earned a BA in linguistics from Boston University and a PhD in linguistics with a specialization in cognitive science from Northwestern University.
