People | ChangeLing Lab

Associate Research Professor

GHC 5407

5000 Forbes Ave

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

David R. Mortensen is a computational linguist specializing in phonology, morphology, and language change and is Associate Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the head of ChangeLing Lab.

Shikhar Bharadwaj

PhD Student

Shikhar Bharadwaj is a third year PhD student in ChangeLing Lab. His interests are speech processing and learning world knowledge from speech. He is currently involved in building phonetic foundation models.

Chin-Jou Li

PhD Student

Chin-Jou Li is a first year LTI PhD student. She worked on and universal phone recognition and atypical speech assessment during her master’s here, and she’s now continuing to explore these areas.

John Ternullo

5LT Student

John Ternullo is a student in the Fifth Year Master’s Program in Language Technologies at CMU and a member of the ChangeLing Lab. He is interested in multilingual ASR and technologies for low-resource languages. His past work has applied computational methods to phonological typology.

Atharva Naik

PhD Student

Atharva Naik is a PhD student advised by Prof. Carolyn Rose at the Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He also collaborates closely with Prof. Daniel Fried and Prof. David Mortensen. His research focuses on easy-to-hard generalization for LLM agents. He studies how to improve agent capabilities through controllable-difficulty synthetic data generation, post-training with verifiable or meta-level supervision, and inference-time optimization. He applies these methods to coding agents for code quality (code review, linting, refactoring), data science agents (e.g., Kaggle-style challenges), and computational linguistics (e.g., forward reconstruction).