Mattias Heldner Professor, Head of Department
Contact
Name and title: Mattias HeldnerProfessor, Head of Department
ORCID0000-0002-0034-0924 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: Department of Linguistics Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room C 265Universitetsvägen 10 C, plan 2-3
Postal address Institutionen för lingvistik106 91 Stockholm
About me
Mattias Heldner [maˈtʰìːas ˈhɛ́ldnɛr] born 1969.
I am the Chair Professor of Phonetics at Stockholm University since 2011. I have served as Head of Department from 2020 to present. I have also been Director of the Phonetics Lab from 2011 to 2025.
I received my PhD in Phonetics from Umeå University in 2002. I was a Researcher at the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology from 2002 to 2011 and became Docent in Speech communication there in 2007. During that period, I was also a postdoctoral fellow at TeliaSonera Sweden (in 2005); Senior lecturer (part-time) at University of Gothenburg (from 2006 to 2009); and phonetics consultant for the company STTS AB (2006). I was appointed Professor in Phonetics at Stockholm University in 2011.
I have mostly taught courses in phonetics for Speech and Language Pathology students at Karolinska Institutet, University of Gothenburg and Umeå University. More recently, I have also been involved in the Master's Programme in AI and Language at Stockholm University. In 2009, I received Medicinska föreningen i Göteborgs (MFGs) pedagogical prize Guldtackan.
I am currently co-supervisor for two PhD students. I have supervised three PhD theses to completion as main supervisor and one as co-supervisor. I have also supervised two postdocs.
My main research interests are communicative behaviour relevant for turn-taking in conversation (e.g. prosody, breathing, voice quality), and signalling of prosodic functions such as prominence and boundaries. I am currently participating in a project examining the effects of body posture on speech production. I have been involved in eleven successful major research grant proposals, four as PI and seven as co-PI. I collaborate with colleagues worldwide.
I received Eva and Lars Gårdings Prize in Linguistics from the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund in 2024. I was a Visiting Fellow at Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University in 2022 and Visiting Researcher at Computer Science, Columbia University in 2010.
I have served as external examiner at three PhD defences and at one final review. I have also been member of the examination committees at nine PhD defences. I have evaluated research and appointments at various academic institutions, and acted as a reviewer for several international peer-reviewed journals. I was one of the three Technical Program Chairs for the international conference Interspeech 2017 in Stockholm.
As a Director of the Phonetics lab, I developed recording facilities for breathing movements and voice quality dynamics in conversation, as well as more general facilities for capturing acoustic and physiological signals with a very high level of experimental control.
My scientific work has resulted in 81 research papers published in international peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences. My research publications have been cited more than 3 800 times in international scientific journals and I have an h-index of 31 and an i10-index of 64 in Google Scholar (April 21, 2026). Similarly, I have an h-index of 18 and 1290 citations in Scopus (April 21, 2026).