Dr. Cordova, a resident of Putnam County, is an education researcher at the University of Florida where she teaches cultural and historical foundations courses. She is also the Co-Director of the All Y’all Social Justice Collective, an organization which provides racial justice professional development experiences for teachers in the Southern region of the United States. Her research interests focus on rural education experiences, the history of schooling, and community education. Her most recent book, Social Justice Education in Rural Spaces, was published in 2020 through Sense/Brill Publishing.
Dr. Paul Ortiz is a PEN award-winning author and historian. Professor Ortiz received his Ph.D. in history from Duke University in 2000. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the Evergreen State College in 1990 in History and Political Economy after earning his Associate of Arts Degree from Olympic Community College in 1988. Professor Ortiz has been the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) since the fall semester, 2008 and professor of history at the University of Florida. Under his leadership, SPOHP has received several national academic awards. He has helped to raise more than two million dollars in grants, donations, and contracts for the program.
Dr. Moeller is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida as of the Fall semester of 2021. Her research encompasses two complementary approaches. First, applying computational methods to documentary and descriptive linguistics. Second, improving natural language processing (NLP) systems with insights from linguistic analysis. Dr. Moeller has a keen interest in bridging the technological gap between NLP and “pen-and-paper” linguistics. Her special interest has long been minority languages of the former Soviet Union, where she first encountered language endangerment and later did fieldwork on Nakh-Daghestanian languages. She has found that machine learning can provide automated assistance for linguists and it also opens interesting questions about ethics and best practices in both linguistics and NLP.
Dr. Kevin Tang is a University Professor in English Linguistics at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He is a courtesy Assistant Professorship at the Department of Linguistics and is a member of the Health Cancer Center at University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University College London in 2015. He also holds an M.A. in Linguistics from University College London, an M.Eng. and a B.A. in Engineering from the University of Cambridge. He completed his postdoctoral training at Yale University. His current research concerns the development and applications of speech technology for human health, such as the representation of spoken speech, speech as biomarkers for neurological diseases, sociolinguistic biases in Automatic Speech Recognition, and precision health in health communication and intervention.