Ben Naismith
Staff Assessment Scientist Linguist at Duolingo English Test
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Naismith is a Staff Assessment Scientist and linguist with a PhD in Applied Linguistics and eight years of experience designing language assessments and teacher-training programs, currently advancing assessment science at Duolingo English Test. He blends rigorous corpus-informed research in TESOL, SLA, and lexical proficiency with practical experience as a teacher, director of studies, and materials developer across international contexts. His work bridges academic research and product-facing assessment design, bringing classroom insights to scalable, data-driven measurement. Based in Pittsburgh, he also draws on a background in music performance, an uncommon cross-disciplinary perspective that enriches his approach to language learning and pedagogy.
9 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Music, Music Performance, Bachelor of Music, Music Performance at Humber CollegeDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Applied Linguistics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Applied Linguistics at University of PittsburghMaster of Science (MSc), Applied Linguistics, Master of Science (MSc), Applied Linguistics at Aston University
Spanish, English, American Sign Language, French
Github Skills (13)
orange9
data-mining6
text-summarization5
bert4
pytorch3
datasets3
data-processing3
coreference3
data-management3
data-science2
metadata2
phonetics1
dataflow1
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
ELI-Data-Mining-Group/PELIC-dataset
Aug 2020 - Mar 2021
Contributions:2 releases, 15 commits, 15 pushes in 7 months
bnaismith/Class-Practice-Repo
Sep 2017 - Nov 2017
Contributions:23 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
reactjavascriptpracticingnodejsactivities
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.