Anita Mehta held a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics until the end of 2019 and is currently an Academic Visitor at the Faculty of Linguistics.

A Rhodes Scholar, she did her MA and DPhil in theoretical physics at Oxford, and subsequently worked in Cambridge, Birmingham and India. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard in 2007-8 and an EPSRC Fellow at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford in 1998-9.

A theoretical physicist of complex systems, she uses statistical physics approaches for the quantitative modelling of topics in linguistics. She has worked on the dynamical evolution of languages and grammatical forms, as well as speech perception, which is the topic of her current research.