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Abstract Much of my research has involved studying how small changes in the spatiotemporal coordination of speech articulators affect variability in the acoustic characteristics of the speech signal. This interest in speech variability ultimately led me to develop a speech inversion (SI) system that recovers articulatory movements of the lips, tongue tip, and tongue body from the speech signal. Recently, we were able to extend the SI system to provide information about the velopharyngeal port opening (nasality) and will soon investigate a methodology to uncover information about the tongue root and the size of the glottal opening. Our SI system has proven to be speaker independent and generalizes well across acoustic databases. In this talk, I will explain how we developed the SI system, and ways in which we have used it to date: for clinical purposes in mental health and speech disorder assessment, in scientific analysis of cross-linguistic speech patterns, and for improving automatic speech recognition. Biography Carol Espy-Wilson is a full professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland College Park. She received her BS in electrical engineering from Stanford University and her MS, EE and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Espy-Wilson is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and the IEEE. She was recently elected VP-elect of ASA, and to the ISCA Advisory Board. She is currently serving on the Editorial Board of Computer, Speech and Language. She has been Chair of the Speech Communication Technical Committee of ASA, elected member of the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE and Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Finally, at the National Institutes of Health, she has served on the Advisory Councils for the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders and the National Institutes of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, on the Medical Rehabilitation Advisory Board of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and she has been a member of the Language and Communication Study Section. Carol directs the Speech Communication Lab where they combine digital signal processing, speech science, linguistics and machine learning to conduct research in speech communication. Current research projects include speech inversion, mental health assessment based on speech, video and text, speech recognition for elementary school classrooms, entrainment based on articulatory and facial gestures in unstructured conversations between neurotypical and neurodiverse participants, and speech enhancement. Her laboratory has received federal funding (NSF, NIH and DoD) and industry grants and she has 13 patents.