LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Harry and Roberta Lyons, parents of Kate Lyons, a graduate of Lower Lake High School are pleased to announce Kate has received her Doctor of Philosophy in linguistics from the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kate Lyons, 27, graduated from Lower Lake High School in 2008 and received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012.

She graduated with honors from Berkeley majoring in South and Southeast Asian studies, receiving the Departmental Citation award for outstanding scholarship.

Lyons’ studies in linguistics at the University of Illinois were centered in sociolinguistics, a subfield concerned with the relationships between language and society.

Her research explores how written or displayed language reflects and structures meaning in and of public spaces of interaction.

While Lyons has chiefly published on displayed language of physical places (e.g. the language of shop signs, advertisements, fliers, billboards or street art on display in gentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco and Chicago) her doctoral research turned to the dynamics of the digital-physical interface of place and interaction, studying the language of geotagged posts and comments on Instagram.

Her work positions language displayed in public spaces not as a static indicator but as an integral social tool by which people shape their environment, arguing that what a neighborhood or social media platform ‘means’ as a space at any given time or place is a continuous and often incongruous negotiation between various people, establishments and institutions.

Lyons successfully defended her dissertation, titled “From Street to Screen: Linguistic Productions of Place in San Francisco’s Mission District,” in May 2017 and was formally awarded her degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics from the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2018.

Lyons graduated as valedictorian from Lower Lake High School and received many other honors; she graduated with high honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from Berkeley and was accepted and provided a full tuition waiver to attend the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

While there Lyons was involved in numerous outreach projects including developing and presenting professional development workshops to local schools on language attitudes and other sociolinguistic topics and co-running the Linguistic Department’s graduate student conference.

Currently Kate Lyons is a post-doctoral fellow with Insight Data Science and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.