William N. Havard

I got my Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Université Grenoble Alpes in July 2021. I worked at the LIG laboratory (GETALP team) and at LIDILEM laboratory and was supervised by Pr. Laurent Besacier and Pr. Jean-Pierre Chevrot. During my final year, I was also ATER (temporary teaching and research fellow) at IUT2 Grenoble where I taught in the Computer Science department.

From October 2021 to September 2023, I worked at the LSCP laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher and was a member of the LAAC team (Language Acquisition Across Cultures).

In October 2023, I joined the LLL (Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique) at the University of Orléans (not the new one, the old one) to work on speech technologies for Creole languages, more specifically Haitian and Mauritian, in collaboration with Pr. Emmanuel Schang and Pr. Benjamin Lecouteux from the LIG laboratory (GETALP team).

In February 2026, I left academia and joined Mistral AI as an Applied AI Scientist.

Most of my work revolves around speech processing, and deep learning. I’m also interested in language typology and endangered language documentation and description.

In my free time, I enjoy reading — mainly historical novels — learning languages, and photography.