Ghada Khattab is Professor in Phonetics and Phonology in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University.

A native speaker of Lebanese Arabic, Ghada grew up in Lebanon and started her career as a primary and secondary school teacher in Lebanon before specialising in Linguistics and completing her PhD in at the University of Leeds, UK in 2003.

Since then she has spearheaded research in the areas phonological development in monolingual and bilingual children, Arabic phonetics and phonology, and sociolinguistics. 

She has collaborated with colleagues at Newcastle, Plymouth, York, France, Norway, Germany, the USA and around the Arab world on projects to the value of £3.5m that look at language development in lesser studied languages and in multilingual contexts. She has also supervised several doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in this area, and published widely on all aspects of her research. 

Ghada is the Principal Investigator of our Bulbul project, and is really looking forward to the interdisciplinary and international collaboration that a project of this nature allows.