Joe Alberti '06

Joe Alberti has been a teacher in the School District of Philadelphia for 16 years. He has been a teacher at his neighborhood school, Samuel Powel Elementary, for ten years, teaching 3rd and 4th grade and was a part of the school's leadership team. He recently moved to Julia R. Masterman school, a school for gifted and talented youth in the public school district, bringing project-based learning, inquiry, and the design process to his 6th grade math and literacy classes. He earned a Ph.D. in Education from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. He has also taught courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and at Community College of Philadelphia. He has also co-taught a course and led independent studies for undergraduate students at Swarthmore College in the Education Department. He earned National Board Certification for Teaching in 2012, the highest level of commendation/certification a teacher can earn in the United States of America (fewer than 3% of teachers in the U.S. achieve this level). He is a member of the Philadelphia Teacher Learning Cooperative, the Teacher Action Group in Philadelphia, Teachers Lead Philly, and Need in Deed, an organization that brings service learning to classrooms. He looks forward to bringing all of his experiences to the University of Vermont this summer. He is a board member of his neighborhood's Civic Association, serving as the chair of the streets committee. He is also a volunteer driver for Philly Patient Ride, a volunteer program that transports cancer patients to their treatments who have no other means of getting to the hospital.

Charles Armstrong '13 (Linguistics/Biology) has continued to have his intersectional Ling/Bio marble cake and eat it too, whether doing medical writing, medical editing, or... singing science? The latter has led Charles to found "Scinguistics", a community and movement centered around the application of medical SCience and sINGing analysis to the paralingUISTICS of voice use and modification. In addition to singing and voice acting, Scinguistics is most notable for its gendered voice pedagogy for transgender and GNC voice users. Thanks to support from clients such as Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints), the movement continues to gain momentum with 7,000+ members across its different platforms, and is currently developing a proposal for disseminating more efficacious transgender voice pedagogy to speech language pathologists and other transgender healthcare providers such as phonosurgeons. In addition to these proposals with institutional collaborators in Portugal and Finland, Charles is balancing his Pharmacology thesis on transdermal ephedra alkaloids for voice injury reduction and mentoring a new generation of voice pedagogues (including one Swarthmore graduate and a Swattie hopeful).

Jacob Collard '15

My primary academic interests are computational models for formal syntax and semantics, as well as the application of those models to real-world problems. Since graduating, I have earned a PhD in linguistics from Cornell University for my dissertation on a comparison of grammar formalisms from the perspective of unsupervised learning, and I now work as a post-doctoral researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). At NIST I have been working on applying linguistic theory to problems in information retrieval by taking advantage of implicit syntactic structure in text. This work has been applied in several areas, including identifying computer security vulnerabilities, literature reviews in medicine, and exploring inconsistencies in standards. I have also been working with the Prairies to Woodlands Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle on an online Michif dictionary. Outside of academia, I’ve been learning to play the bowed lyre, hiking, and trying to learn how to draw.

Allison Goldberg '11

Although linguistics still has a large place in my heart, I pursued a career in medicine after my time at Swarthmore. After graduation, I took two years off and worked while shadowing physicians and applying to medical school. I attended Drexel University College of Medicine and then went on to pediatrics residency at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children. Nowadays I work at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as a pediatric hospitalist. Linguistics still found a way into my clinical care, though! At St. Christopher's, I frequently cared for patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and thus regularly used phone and video interpreters. There, under the guidance of attendings particularly interested in caring for LEP patients, I also helped teach my co-residents and medical students how to properly use and document use of foreign language interpreters. Additionally, I started a quality improvement project to increase video (cf. phone) interpreter use. Caring for these patients has been a privilege and learning a few new words and phrases with each interpreter call is lots of fun. 

Being a pediatrician in particular also has its perks for a linguistics nerd -- I've loved watching children effortlessly acquire language(s!), learning what to do when there is language delay, and witnessing the magic that happens when a child is given books. With all my newfound free time as an attending, I am also very much enjoying learning French on DuoLingo and doing NYT word games with my dad. My colleagues always appreciate my proofreading skills and word-choice help, too. :) 
 

Robbie Hart '04

I'm an '04 graduate who wrote a thesis on Himalayan languages and, after I graduated, worked with David Harrison on the ways that small, place-based languages may package environmental information. In the last 17 years, although I jumped from the social sciences to the natural sciences (my Ph.D. was in Biology), I've continued those interests. I'm now an ethnobotanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, where I lead the William L. Brown Center, an interdisciplinary team of researchers dedicated to the study of useful plants, understanding the relationships between humans, plants, and their environment, the conservation of plant species, and the preservation of traditional knowledge for the benefit of future generations. My own research is still focused in the Himalayan region, where I study the impacts of climate change on mountain plants, people, and the ethnobotanical traditions that connect them. I remain deeply interested in the role the that language plays in ethnobotany.

Photo: Collecting temperature data at Kanchenjunga in Nepal, photo credit Elsa Hart

Sonia Mariano '02

Shortly after graduation, I worked in Moscow doing technical translations for the Ministry of Science, subsequently moved to Poland for medical school, then spent a stint in Kentucky for my residency before haring off to New Zealand.  I've worked in New Zealand as a GP, in Urgent Care, and in Emergency Medicine, but also have worked in Switzerland for a year (speaking 5 languages a day at work!  And never the same five!  Heaven!) and have worked with MSF (Medecins sans Frontieres) in the war zone in Ukraine, and later at an aid post on the Khumbu hiking trail in Nepal (learnt Nepali and also had some surprising fun dusting off my Finnish, Spanish and making up medical French).  I had always promised myself I'd do a masters in linguistics some day but that moment has not yet come - in the meantime I currently can speak reasonably well German, Italian, Russian and Spanish and have managed to attain and maintain basic skills in Polish, Finnish, Arabic, Nepali, Navajo and French. 

Other than travel (which we don't do these days) and languages (ditto, mostly, some lackadaisical attempts at French persist) I do nearly any sport that gets me outside, having spent time biking as transportation, running, hiking and camping, rock climbing, snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding and mountain climbing.  I have taught myself to sew and knit and repair clothing (also people!  I repair them too) and I continue an active intellectual life reading in a variety of fields and attempting to activate others to care for the environment,  get outside, and repair things too.

Amy Robertson '83

I graduated in 1983 with a linguistics major and philosophy minor. My thesis addressed the influence of language on thought, and my phil minor focused on logic.  I had long planned to go to law school, but I chose these courses and topics not so much explicitly to prepare myself for that but because the same thing drew me to all of these things:  a fascination with how things work “under the hood” of human language. After a couple of years in big corporate firms, my husband and I started our own small firm in 1996 to focus on impact disability rights litigation, including class action and organizational cases.  We spend a lot of time explaining to judges and other lawyers who believe civil rights are (literally) black and white how a ramp or a sign language interpreter can be just as important to full inclusion. We’ve lived in Colorado since 1995 and enjoy its amazing outdoors with our very enthusiastic dog. 

Tai Warner '19

After graduating two years ago in Computer Science and Linguistics, Tai had the extraordinary opportunity to live in Bhutan. There his eyes were opened to new worlds - Tibetic culture, fractal terrain, and signed communication. Tai worked at the only deaf school in the country as part of a research team documenting the sign language as it emerged among the students and spread into the larger deaf community of Bhutan. He created the first dictionary of Bhutanese Sign Language and worked with the country's Gross National Happiness Commission to publish the first signed translation of the country's laws. After a rewarding 13 months he returned to the US, where he has been living remotely and close to nature, pursuing projects like gardening and training mushrooms to digest plastic waste. He plans to start a job soon in the intersection of tech and languages.