Grant M. Berry, Ph.D.
Linguist. Cognitive Scientist. Scholar.
Curriculum Vitae
Contact
- Grant M. Berry, Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor
- Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
- Cognitive Science Program
- Villanova University
- 800 East Lancaster Avenue, Villanova PA 19085
- Tolentine Hall 142 (office); Mendel Hall G65-B/C (lab), Villanova University
- +1 857 762 4887
- berry.grant@gmail.com
- https://grantberry.info
Full CV and resume are hosted on GitHub: CV and resume.
Appointments
Academic Appointments
- Assistant Professor (Psychological & Brain Sciences & Cognitive Science), Villanova U (Note: PBS affiliation as of August 2025)
- Director, Language Use and Variation Lab, Villanova U
Industry Experience
- Applied Scientist @ (Amazon) Prime Video
- Technical Program Manager (Data Quality) @ Amazon Alexa
- Language Engineer (Household Organization) @ Amazon Alexa
Education and Training
Degrees Earned
- Ph.D. in Spanish & Language Science (Dual Title) @ Penn State U
- M.A. in Spanish @ Penn State U
- B.S. in Mathematics @ Truman State U
- B.A. in Spanish @ Truman State U
Additional Training & Affiliations
- Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (Argentina)
- Visiting Scholar @ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Netherlands)
- Visiting Scholar @ U of Pennsylvania
- Visiting Scholar @ Radboud U (Netherlands)
- Amazon Machine Learning University
- Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute Fellowship (U Chicago)
Research Methods & Tools
Research Leadership & Project Management
- KPI Creation & Monitoring
- Concise Technical Writing
- Agile Methodology and Scrum
- Roadmapping/Scoping effort
- Prepared over 25 undergraduates for professional success, including Fulbright Fellowships, competitive internships, and top PhD programs
Technical Expertise
- Data visualization: Create intuitive, informative, and visually appealing representations of complex data
- Acoustic Analysis: Advanced knowledge of acoustic correlates of speech and variation in English and Spanish
- Data wrangling & manipulation: tidyverse, pandas
- Statistics: Advanced knowledge of Bayesian and frequentist statistical methods (regression, gams, pca, time series analysis, survival analysis)
- AI/ML: Model fine-tuning, prompt generation, optimization, fairness
- NLU/NLP: Developed and deployed deterministic and probabilistic artifacts at scale
- Localization: Detailed understanding of language variation and change in English and Spanish
Languages
Human Languages
- Native fluency in American English; Near-native fluency in Spanish
- General knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Modern Standard Arabic, Dutch, and Classical Latin
Programming Languages
- Python (3.x): sk-learn, huggingface, langchain, pandas, pytorch, librosa, mne, jupyter, seaborn, nltk, beautifulsoup
- R: tidyverse, ggplot2, rstanarm, lme4, mgcv
- SQL: Intermediate
- BASH/Z-shell: Intermediate (very comfortable with CLIs)
Teaching & Public Engagement
Public Engagement & Media
- Siri and Alexa are playing catch-up with chatbots (Marketplace; 02/19/2025)
- You gotta have rizz to slay – How Oxford chooses its word of the year (KYW News Radio; 12/28/23)
- Alexa, how do you work? (Villanova Magazine; Fall 2023)
- Community Conversations: Sociolinguistics (Main Line Network Public Access)
- So does Elmo have a Philly accent? We asked an expert (Philadelphia Magazine; 01/21/22)
- Philly Accent: There’s a lot Youse Don’t Know (Philadelphia Inquirer; 02/15/19)
Teaching
- Fairness in Artificial Intelligence
- Bilingualism
- Linguistics as a Cognitive Science
- Phonetics
- Research Methods