Language Resource Center

Faculty and Staff

Stéphane Charitos
Director

Phone: 212-854-6341

Email: sc758@columbia.edu

Bio »

After studying Statistics and Econometrics at the U. of Athens, Greece, Stéphane Charitos earned a B.Sc. in Data Processing and Quantitative Analysis from the U. of Arkansas. He took his M.A in French and Philosophy from the same university in 1983 before completing a Ph.D. in French and Spanish from the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992.

Stéphane taught French and Modern Greek at a number of universities including UNC-Wilmington, NC Trinity College, CT and Hollins College, VA before becoming Assistant Professor of French at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia in 1991. At ODU, he taught throughout the French language, literature, and culture curriculum as well as helping design, implement and deliver distance learning courses in conjunction with the school’s Darden Department of Education.

In 1996, Stéphane moved to the U. of Memphis, TN and was hired a year later by Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL to design and direct the university’s Foreign Language Media Center. In 1998, Columbia University hired him to design and direct the Language Resource Center, a Mellon funded initiative which oversees language instruction in less commonly taught languages and provides training and assistance to language faculty integrating media-rich applications into the second-language teaching curriculum.

Stéphane has given papers and published in areas as diverse as 16th and 20th-century French and Francophone literature, Cultural and Film Studies, Modern Greek Studies, Critical Theory as well as on issues related to technology and language instruction.

Christopher Kaiser
Associate Director

Phone: 212-854-6132

Email: ck2831@columbia.edu

Bio »

Christopher Kaiser is the Associate Director of the Columbia University Language Resource Center. He received his B.A. in Italian and Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh, his M.A. in Italian Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and his Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Yale University. His areas of interest include second language pedagogy, distance learning, artificial intelligence, inter-institutional collaboration, the relationship between climate and language, and language-learning advocacy. He is also the host of Said & Done, the LRC’s monthly podcast about language learning: https://www.lrc.columbia.edu/podcast/

Darcy Pleckham
Systems Administrator

Phone: 212-854-9028

Email: dfp2111@columbia.edu

Simon Zuberek
Educational Technologist

Phone: 212-854-9227

Email: sez2117@columbia.edu

Bio »

As the educational technologist at the Language Resource Center, Simon helps devise creative and effective ways of incorporating technology in language classroom.

Simon received his B.A. in Germanic Studies and Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then went on to earn an M.A. in Germanic Studies and Second Language Acquisition, followed by an M.A. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is currently working on a degree in Computational Linguistics at the Graduate College at CUNY.

His academic work resides at the crossroads of formal and applied linguistics, and computer science.  He is particularly interested in oral practice. Automated scoring of open-ended spoken responses, intelligent tutoring, grammatical error detection and correction, or spoken dialog solutions, are some of the classroom applications of NLP Simon has been investigating.

You can learn more about Simon here.

Vera Felder
Shared Course Initiative Program Manager

Phone: 212-854-3326

Email: vf2321@columbia.edu

Bio »

Vera Felder is the Program Manager of the Shared Course Initiative, an inter-institutional collaboration between Columbia, Cornell, and Yale Universities for supporting and sustaining less commonly taught languages.

Before joining Columbia’s Language Resource Center, she earned her doctorate degree from the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley and her M.A. and B.A. in Linguistics from San Francisco State University. Her area of interest is cognitive linguistics with an emphasis on second language acquisition and teaching methodologies.

Administrative Assistant

Phone: 212-854-9224

Dwijen Bhattacharjya
Instructor of Bengali

Phone: 212-854-9224

Email: db174@columbia.edu

Liam Liesanggoro
Instructor of Indonesian

Phone: 212-854-9224

Email: ll3765@columbia.edu

Sandeep Singh
Instructor of Punjabi

Phone: 212-854-9224

Email: ss2343@columbia.edu