Stephan C. Meylan, Ph.D.

I am the managing director of Surprisal B.V., a Netherlands-based tech consultancy focused on the deployment of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing tools to facilitate data collection, analysis, and decision-making.

Previously, I was an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley working on multimodal neural models of speech perception and production and before that a Research Scientist at MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences working on neural models of communication. I held postdocs at both MIT and Duke University, earned a doctorate in Psychology (computational cognitive science) from UC Berkeley, and completed a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University. My academic research, which focused on computational models of language acquisition and language processing, was funded by the NIH, NSF, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, DARPA, the Simons Foundation, and Project CETI (sperm whale communication!).

With the exception of a few key projects, my academic work has been on hold since December 2025. For posterity I still maintain my page of Publications and Research Topics.