Christine Shadle Obituary

Christine Helen Shadle (“Chris”) was born on February 6th, 1954, in Pasadena, California, and grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes, the middle sister in a family of three girls. She completed a double major in Electrical Engineering and Music (piano performance) at Stanford University in 1976. She then moved to the East Coast and worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, for 2 years before moving to Boston to undertake a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering at MIT. Her thesis topic was the acoustics of speech production, especially fricatives, a research area that she would continue to pursue avidly for the rest of her life.

After completing her Ph.D in 1985 she was awarded two Postdoctoral Fellowships (Hunt and NATO) which allowed her to travel to Europe to pursue her research interests, first at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton in England, then at the Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden.

While at Southampton she met her future husband, Andrew Currie. The two were married in August 1989. She remained in England, taking up a teaching position in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and continuing her research in collaboration with colleagues at the Universities of Leeds, England, and Grenoble, France, and elsewhere.

In 1995 she and Andrew took a 9-month sabbatical in Japan, where she worked as an invited researcher at ATR Human Information Processing Research Labs in Kyoto.

In 2004 they moved from Southampton to Connecticut so that Chris could pursue her research full-time as a Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, where she worked on vocal tract modeling and imaging using MRI and other advanced techniques. In 2023, many Haskins Laboratories researchers received appointments at the Yale University School of Medicine and Chris became a research scientist in the Yale Child Study Center.

Chris was a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and served on multiple technical committees. She was a member of the Editorial Board of the ASA Press.

Chris was an accomplished pianist and choral singer, and a long-time member of the New Haven Oratorio Choir and the Unitarian Society of New Haven, serving on the Board of both organizations.

Chris was diagnosed with multiple cancers in January 2025, and passed away at Yale New Haven Hospital on January 24th, 2026, with her husband Andrew at her bedside. In addition to her husband she is survived by her younger sister Paula. (Her older sister Sally died of cancer in 2007.) She had no children.