Prof.Dr. Jan Odijk is full professor of language and speech technology at UIL-OTS (University of Utrecht) since 2001. He has a background in theoretical and computational linguistics and got his PhD at the University of Tilburg in 1993. He worked as an employee of the University of Utrecht on theoretical syntax (1982-1985), and on machine translation in the Rosetta project at Philips Research Labs (1985-1988). From 1988-1992 he continued his research into machine translation as an employee of Philips, and later focused on language and speech interfaces (1992-1997) at IPO, Eindhoven and the Philips Research Labs.
Since 1997 he worked at Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (in Ieper, Belgium) as Senior Director Linguistic Resources, and continued this position in L&H’s successors ScanSoft and Nuance until 2008. He has been involved in a wide range of national and European projects related to language resources,. He was member of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) and IMIX steering committees. He was board member of ELRA from 2000-2006, chaired the programme committee of the Dutch/Flemish language and speech technology programme STEVIN, participated in the EU project META-NET, is the Netherlands National Anchor Point for the META network, was programme director of CLARIN-NL (2009-2015) and CLARIAH-SEED (2013-2014), and is CLARIAH-CORE director since 2015.