Researchers show their media talent
Dr Thomas Bak and Dr Joanna Kopaczyk from the school of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences have been selected to participate in the University's MediaTalent programme.
MediaTalent is a competitive scheme which trains academics to interact more effectively with media so that their research can reach a broader audience. In 2015/16, MediaTalent's first year, the academics who completed training went on to appear in the media more than 50 times.
Dr Thomas Bak (Psychology) is a Reader in Human Cognitive Neuroscience whose research interests include neurodegenerative diseases, bilingualism, and cognitive ageing. His current projects include a collaboration with Lingo Flamingo – a social enterprise aiming to make the positive consequences of learning a second language available to adults with dementia – and the Speak:Unique project, which is developing personalised solutions for voice loss in patients with motor neurone disease.
Dr Joanna Kopaczyk (Linguistics and English Language) is a historical linguist with a focus on Older Scots and corpus linguistics. She is affiliated with the Angus Mcintosh Centre for Historical Linguistics and is currently working on the FITS project: From Inglis to Scots. The FITS project aims to survey variation over time in the spelling and sound in Scots. She is the author of The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs, which uses corpus analysis to examine historical legal documents.
Drs Bak and Kopaczyk will attend in-depth training for writing news stories and speaking in podcasts and documentaries in order to make their research more available to the general public.
More information
MediaTalent programme
Speak:Unique - Voicebank project
Collaboration with LingoFlamingo