Panelists
Erin Blakenship, System Analyst Advisor, General Dynamics Information Technology
Erin Blankenship is a linguist and educator presently working in social media advertising and data analytics. While much of her recent career has focused on mis-/disinformation on social media platforms in Western Asia, Erin has worked in academia, public affairs, private language instruction, and translation and interpretation. She is now beginning a long-term career shift into Jewish clergy work and Jewish education.
Erin received her BA in French and in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies from McDaniel College, and her MA in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University. She began PhD coursework in Iranian Studies at UCLA before choosing to leave her studies and teach Arabic full-time, at which point she directed the Arabic program at University of South Carolina and taught at the Middlebury Arabic School. Since leaving academia, she has transitioned into defense translation and analysis, working in countering mis-/disinformation and propaganda on Arabic- and Persian-language social media, with a brief stint in Hebrew-language public affairs and target audience analysis in Western and Central Asia. Erin now works in social media marketing and data analytics, using her language skills to better contextualize the efficacy of online marketing efforts and improve audience targeting. She recently also began coursework to pursue rabbinic ordination and hopes to move into teaching and cantorial work in the Jewish world.
Emily Crnkovich, Linguist, Mango Languages
Emily is a content linguist at Mango Languages, an award-winning language learning app that offers 70+ languages. Her day-to-day work includes developing new and innovative language lessons, managing teams of developers, and planning for future development projects. She mostly works in Spanish and French education, but is constantly working to expand Mango’s resources for less commonly-taught languages like Levantine Arabic and Ladino. Emily received a BA in linguistics from Macalester College and an MS in linguistics from Georgetown University.
Aaron Schliem, AIML Product Manager, Welocalize
Aaron is a veteran of the language industry with broad leadership experience in language instruction, interpreting, design adaptation, translation/localization and most recently multilingual AI. He focuses presently on design and deployment of data pipelines for state-of-the-art machine learning models for some of the largest tech companies in the world, providing computational linguistic consulting and business analysis to deliver diverse data sets that enable both domain specialization and cultural adaptation of contemporary Generative AI models and products. Recent areas of focus include AI product management, cross-cultural LLM benchmarking standards, and data worker competency assessment protocols. Aaron is a fluent speaker of Spanish and can get by in Brazilian Portuguese, French, Catalan and Italian. During his time at UW-Madison, he studied International Relations and Molecular Biology (ironically his worst grade in college was in International Business, which is ultimately where his career led him). Outside of work Aaron is passionate about creole linguistics, Colombian gay literature, Afrobeats music, and coaching volleyball.
Christopher Stewart, Computational Linguist, Google; Research Associate, University of Memphis
Christopher Stewart holds a PhD in French (Linguistics) and has worked as a tenure-track professor. He has also held positions as a voice engineer, a data scientist and an analytical linguist at Google. He is currently a Sr. Computational Linguist at Google and a Research Associate at the University of Memphis’s Institute for Intelligent Systems. He is most of the way through a book on language technologies for beginners and is passionate about helping PhDs find rewarding careers in tech.
