KATHERINE HARRIS

HARRIS--Katherine Safford age 98, died peacefully in Jamesville, NY, on the morning of March 15, 2024. She was born and grew up in Lowell, MA, moving to Mississippi in the early years of WWII. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947. There she worked as an assistant to renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner and designed a somewhat specialized experiment in which she taught pigeons to play ping-pong. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1953 and, while there, met her husband of 71 years, George Harris. Kathy was a trailblazer in the world of speech sciences. She was a pioneering researcher at Haskins Laboratories, a preeminent facility for research on spoken and written language, and served as Vice President of the institution. While there, Kathy contributed to several fundamental findings in speech science including in the areas of phoneme labeling, third-format transitions in the perception of stop consonants, and acoustic cues for fricative perception in American English. She was invited to speak at an International Congress on Acoustics in Tokyo, Japan in 1968, and started a collaborative partnership between Japanese and American researchers at Haskins. She also worked as Distinguished Professor in Speech and Hearing at CUNY Graduate School, one of the first women to hold the title. Training and empowering the next generation of clinical researchers was extremely important to her; in her over 200 refereed articles she would often insist that her students' names be listed before her own. Her scholarship led to her being invited by the Israeli government to work in Israel as a visiting scholar, where she performed research at Tel HaShomer Hospital. In 1980, she co-authored the Speech Science Primer, a textbook still in use by students of speech pathology and audiology today. She was elected President of the Acoustical Society of America and served from 2000-01. Kathy was an avid gardener and wonderful cook. She was a member of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Auxiliary and was an editor on the Auxiliary's "A Cookbook." She was also on the Board of the Brooklyn YMCA. She spent many of her summers with her family in Heath, Massachusetts, where she served on the Board of the Heath Historical Society. A Jew by choice, Kathy was a member of the Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn and later Temple Concord in Syracuse, NY. Kathy also raised a wonderful family, who will miss her very much. She is survived by her husband George Harris, her daughters Maud White and Louise Harris, her son-in-law Alvin White, and her grandsons Samuel White and Jesse White. A ceremony to celebrate Kathy's life will occur at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family asks donations be made in Kathy's memory to the White-Harris Fund at the Crouse Health Foundation in Syracuse, NY.