• Phonetic variation in respect to regions, to individuals or to other linguistic or extra-linguistic factors
• Forensic phonetics (board member of the Center for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (CFPA) and occasional work as an expert witness in the Center or for the Zurich Forensic Science Institute)
• Phonetics and speech therapy
• Quality assurance in higher education

• Studies of linguistics at the University of Fribourg and the Freie Universität Berlin
• Prize of the University of Fribourg for the best master thesis
• PhD on the pronunciation of Standard German in German speaking Switzerland (2002)
• Aston University Diploma in Forensic Linguistics (2013)

• Three projects on geographical phonetic variation analysed acoustic differences between vowels in Swiss German (H. Christen, UniFR, 2015-2016), involved the development of the smartphone application Swiss Voice App, which provides the users with information about their own voice and localizes their dialect (A. Leemann, UZH, 2013-2014), and examined phonetic and sylistic variation of spoken Standard German (H. Christen, UniFR, 2005-2008).
• A subproject in the research project Speaker identification based on temporal information (V. Dellwo, UZH 2012-2013) in the field of forensic linguistics looked into the effects of voice disguise.
• A project on prosody used speech synthesis modeling in order to gain new insights into timing aspects, intonation, phrasing and pauses (E. Keller, UniL & I. Werlen, UniBE, 2002-2004).
• A research project in collaboration with speech therapists examined the effects of the different linguistic situations in Switzerland and Germany for children learning to spell (2017-2019). A more lexically oriented project looked at terms used for people in various family constellations (H. Christen, UniFR: 2004-2006), another lexical project resulted in a dictionary of a Swiss German dialect (Senslerdeutsches Wörterbuch; W. Haas, UniFR: 1997-1999).
• A project on measuring research output aimed to develop and test a methodology to quantify research output in the Humanities (B. Lepori, USI, 2009-2012).

Lecturer (since 2001) at the Universities of Zurich, Fribourg, Lausanne, and Berne as well as the University of Teacher Education in Berne (Pädagogische Hochschule Bern) and the University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education in Zurich (Hochschule für Heilpädagogik).