Steering committee

The EFL (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics) project is led by a structured, collegial, and interdisciplinary management team that ensures scientific quality, strategic coordination, and the smooth operational functioning of the program.

Scientific coordination

The project is coordinated by Ioana Chitoran, professor at Université Paris Cité, specialist in phonetics, phonology, and linguistic diversity. She provides scientific and strategic leadership for the EFL consortium, drawing on her extensive experience in managing large-scale collaborative projects.

Her role includes supervising research areas, institutional representation, overall scientific consistency, and liaising with national and international academic partners.

Core Management Team

Alongside the coordinator, the management team includes:

4 assistant coordinators, representing the different disciplines and themes of the project (formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, neuroscience, etc.);
1 project manager in charge of administrative, logistical, and budgetary oversight;

Thematic liaisons in each work package, responsible for local scientific coordination, recruitment (doctoral students, postdocs), and liaison with partner units.

Participatory governance

EFL is based on multi-level governance:

An Executive Board, responsible for operational decisions (budgets, calls for projects, recruitment).
A Governing Board, which brings together representatives from the research units to set the broad scientific guidelines.
An Annual General Meeting that brings together all members of the consortium.
An international Advisory Board, composed of academic experts and a representative from the private sector, consulted to refine the project’s scientific strategy.

This governance structure ensures that EFL is managed in a rigorous and transparent manner that is open to interdisciplinarity, an essential condition for conducting cutting-edge research on language in all its dimensions.

Ioana Chitoran

Scientific and Technical Manager of the EFL Project

Ioana Chitoran is a professor at Paris Cité University and scientific coordinator of the EFL project. A specialist in phonetics, phonology, and linguistic diversity, she leads the consortium with solid experience in interdisciplinary projects. She ensures overall scientific consistency, links between research areas, and partnership strategy. She plays a central role in the structure, visibility, and international reach of EFL. She also oversees recruitment and the implementation of the program’s main objectives. Her vision combines scientific rigor with an openness to the societal challenges of language.

Christel Preterre

Project manager of EFL project

Christel Preterre has been in charge of the EFL project since 2011, when it was still known as Labex EFL. She oversees the organization of calls for applications for incoming and outgoing doctoral mobility, international chairs, and training grants, thus ensuring the essential link between doctoral students, research teams, and the project’s decision-making bodies.

Thierry Charnois

Co-manager of the EFL project

Thierry Charnois is a professor of computer science at LIPN (Sorbonne Paris Nord University) and a specialist in natural language processing. As part of the EFL project, he contributes to the integration of computational approaches to linguistic analysis, in connection with large language models and information extraction. He also participates in the implementation of shared platforms and the development of tool-based methodologies for exploring the semantics of languages on a large scale.

Barbara Hemforth

Co-manager of the EFL project

Research Director at the Formal Linguistics Laboratory (LLF, CNRS – Université Paris Cité), Barbara Hemforth is one of the EFL project’s key scientific correspondents. Former head of Labex EFL from 2020 to 2024, she has been a member of the management team for the new EFL project since February 2025. An expert in experimental linguistics at the crossroads of syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics, she brings to the project solid expertise in empirical methods (behavioral, neuroscientific, corpus) and ensures the interdisciplinary scientific coherence of the consortium’s research areas.

Laurianne Cabrera

Co-manager of the EFL project

As a CNRS researcher at the INCC (Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center) at Paris Cité University, Laurianne Cabrera contributes to the EFL project with her expertise in auditory perception development and language acquisition in children. Her research focuses on early auditory mechanisms—such as phonetic contrast discrimination in infants—and the impact of hearing impairments on these processes. In collaboration with other EFL research areas, she contributes to the dialogue between linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology on fundamental questions of language processing throughout life, from early childhood to school age.

Anne Hermes

Co-manager of the EFL project

Anne Hermes is a senior researcher (HDR) at the Phonetics and Phonology Laboratory (UMR 7018, CNRS – Sorbonne Nouvelle) and an expert in laboratory phonology. She focuses on speech variation, which she interprets as an integral part of phonological organization, exploring the effects of linguistic (prosody), biological (aging), and pathological (speech disorders) factors. As part of the EFL project, she contributes to modeling coordination structures in a nonlinear dynamic system, integrating experimental variation, phonological theorization, and phenomena in different populations.

Tatiana Nikitina

Co-manager of the EFL project

Research Director at the CNRS and Co-Director of Theme 2, “Experimental Grammar from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective,” alongside Anne Abeillé, Tatiana Nikitina specializes in linguistic typology, formal syntax, lexical semantics, and language documentation. An expert in reported speech, she conducts in-depth research on Mandé, Turkic, and classical languages, while coordinating experimental and empirical approaches to test grammatical structures from a comparative perspective.