Junko Itō is a professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 at the University of California, Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...

. She is the daughter of mathematician Kiyoshi Itō

Kiyoshi Ito

was a Japanese mathematician whose work is now called Itō calculus. The basic concept of this calculus is the Itō integral, and among the most important results is Itō's lemma. The Itō calculus facilitates mathematical understanding of random events...

.

Itō focuses on phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 and morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

. She is primarily known for her research into syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...

 structure within an optimality theoretic

Optimality theory

Optimality theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints. OT models grammars as systems that provide mappings from inputs to outputs; typically, the inputs are conceived of as underlying representations, and...

 framework. Her work has addressed the phonology of the Japanese language

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, including the rendaku

Rendaku

is a phenomenon in Japanese morphophonology that governs the voicing of the initial consonant of the non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word...

 phenomenon. Her work has been published in Linguistic Inquiry

Linguistic Inquiry

Linguistic Inquiry is a peer-reviewed academic journal in generative linguistics published by the MIT Press since 1970. Ever since its foundation, it has been edited by Samuel Jay Keyser. Many seminal linguistic articles first appeared on its pages. The volumes since 1998 are available online via...

 amongst other peer-reviewed research journals in linguistics. She often collaborates with her UCSC colleague and husband Armin Mester.

She received her Ph.D in Linguistics in 1986 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of Massachusetts Amherst

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public research and land-grant university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States and the flagship of the University of Massachusetts system...

 while studying with Alan Prince

Alan Prince

Alan Sanford Prince is a professor of linguistics at Rutgers University. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as syntax and semantics...

.