Prof. Robert Ladd is Emeritus professor in the linguistic department of Edinburgh University, mainly in the areas of Intonation, Prosody and Laboratory Phonology. He was Head of the former Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (2000-2003). He has been in Edinburgh since the beginning of 1985. Between the time he finished his PhD at Cornell in 1978 and the time he went to Edinburgh he had a series of one- and two-year jobs in various places in the US and Europe. Since going to Edinburgh he has taught at various summer schools and institutes and has had visiting affiliations with the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in Eindhoven (1994), the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (1995), and the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins (2000). For the period 2006-2013 he is a member of the Fachbeirat (Scientific Advisory Council) of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in NijmegenFrom 2001 till 2007 he was heavily involved in creating and running the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences (PPLS). There he played a major role in undergraduate curriculum development in Linguistics and was convener of the PPLS Undergraduate Studies Committee (2004-2006). From 2008 to 2010 he was Acting Head of PPLS, filling the gap created by the promotion of the former Head of School April McMahon. Besides, an important part of his professional life is devoted to editorial work. He was Co-Editor of Language and Speech from 1994-2000 and he has been an Associate Editor of Phonology since 1995. He is also on the editorial boards of Linguistics, Journal of Linguistics and Journal of Phonetics. For the period 2010-2014 he is serving as the first President of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, a newly established international scholarly association. . During his 26-plus years as a full member of staff in Edinburgh University, he taught phonetics and phonology at various levels, supervised PhD students working on a variety of phonetic, phonological, and prosodic topics.