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.

 

Professor Mehta is a theoretical physicist of complex systems: in addition to her current research on the modelling of speech perception, she is working on the dynamical evolution of languages and grammatical forms and optimisation schemes for NP-complete problems.

 

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.

 

Her other interests include writing (fiction and non-fiction), languages and Western classical music.