Kerri is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow based in the Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. She also holds a College Research Associate position at King’s College, where she completed her PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in 2022. Before joining Cambridge, Kerri earned her BA in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Essex in 2013, where she then completed an MRes in Linguistics in 2015. Kerri is a first-generation university student and is dedicated to improving access to higher education.

Kerri’s research interests primarily include the phonetics-phonology interface and sociolinguistics, with a core focus on variation and change in East Anglian English. Her work applies instrumental and experimental approaches to the study of sound and language change across time and space, drawing on methods and theory from sociology and geography.

Her recent research has primarily focused on understanding the links between speech perception and production – both in terms of social meaning and the raw speech signal – and how phonetic and/or individual variation might influence sound change. She is also interested in advancing current techniques in geospatial data visualisation, dialectometry, and statistical physics with a view to better understanding linguistic macrovariation, microvariation, and nanovariation in the English-speaking world today. Kerri recently spent time as a Research Assistant on the Dialect and Heritage Project at the University of Leeds, conducting spatial analysis of linguistic data.