Petra Wagner

Timeline

1. 1998

   Master's thesis on speech synthesis

   They earn an M.A. in linguistics, English studies and psychology at Bielefeld University in 1998, with distinction. Their thesis, "Phonologie und automatische Sprachsynthese" (Phonology and automatic speech synthesis), is supervised by Dafydd Gibbon and Julie Berndsen.

2. 1998–2001

   Speech synthesis for Verbmobil

   From 1998 to 2001, they work as a researcher in the BMBF-funded Verbmobil project, building a prosody module for speech synthesis and developing a unit selection speech synthesis. In 1999, they coauthor "Synthesis by word concatenation" with Karlheinz Stöber, Thomas Portele and Wolfgang Hess, on the speech synthesis module for Verbmobil, a dialogue translation-assistance system, in German and American English.

3. 2001–2008

   Lecturer and doctorate at Bonn

   From 2001 to 2008, they lecture on phonetics and phonology at the Institute of Communication Research and Phonetics, University of Bonn. In 2002, they earn a Dr. phil. there with a thesis on the prediction and perception of German stress patterns, supervised by Wolfgang Hess. In 2007, they co-edit the Sixth ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW6) in Bonn.

4. December 2008

   Associate professor at Bielefeld

   In December 2008, they are appointed associate professor (W2) of phonetics and phonology at Bielefeld University.

5. 2018

   Humboldt award and KTH visit

   In 2018, they receive a Humboldt award for outstanding German researchers in the humanities, granted by the Swedish foundation Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and serve as a visiting professor at KTH Stockholm.

6. 2019

   Rethinking speech synthesis evaluation

   In December 2019, they are appointed full professor (W3) for phonetics at Bielefeld University. In 2019, they lead the author list, with ten coauthors, of "Speech Synthesis Evaluation — State-of-the-Art Assessment and Suggestion for a Novel Research Program" at the 10th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, which reviews text-to-speech evaluation and proposes a user-centered research program.

7. 2024

   Named an ISCA Fellow

   In 2024, they become an ISCA Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association, for contributions to multimodal prosody, conversational interaction, and speech synthesis.

8. As of October 2026

   Phonetics professor and TRR 318

   They are professor of phonetics at Bielefeld University and head the Bielefeld Phonetics Workgroup, whose research covers multimodal prosody, speech synthesis evaluation and speech-based human-machine interaction. They lead subprojects A02, on monitoring the understanding of explanations, and A06, on the multimodal display of stress in clinical explanations, in the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 318 "Constructing Explainability". In 2025, they coauthor the Interspeech paper "Towards Frame-level Quality Predictions of Synthetic Speech" with Michael Kuhlmann, Fritz Seebauer and Reinhold Haeb-Umbach.