Bio
Hi, I'm Šárka! I'm a doctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, pursuing a joint PhD between the University of Göttingen and Radboud University Nijmegen - with the finish line (hopefully) in sight for late 2026.
I study multimodal communication: how speech, gesture, breathing, and the rest of the body work together when we talk to each other. At the heart of my PhD is the idea of communicative effort - how much physical work we put into being understood, how we can actually measure it, and what it tells us about social interaction. My recent work looks at what happens when communication breaks down: do we literally invest more bodily effort to repair a misunderstanding? (Spoiler: yes, though more effort doesn't always mean more success.)
Methods are a big part of what I do. I work with 3D motion capture, pose estimation, and Bayesian modeling, and I care a lot about making these tools accessible to others - which is why I'm a core member of EnvisionBox, a community platform for multimodal research methods.
Before Berlin, I studied at Charles University in Prague, where I earned Master's degrees in Czech philology and in electronic culture and semiotics. I also worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, helping develop Dovyko, a parent questionnaire (MB-CDI) for Czech-learning children, under the supervision of Dr. Nikola Paillereau.
Away from the keyboard, you'll find me hiking, climbing, reading, or hunting for treasures at flea markets - often now accompanied by the newest four-legged member of our family.