Tessa Bent is a Provost Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, director of the Speech Perception Laboratory, and Department Chair. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Linguistics Department and an Affiliate Member for the Cognitive Science Program. She studies children's and adults’ perception and representation of speech, focusing on regional and nonnative accents. She is also conducting research on communication between healthcare providers and aging patients. Her research is currently supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. She earned her B.A. from Millersville University and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She takes an active-learning approach within her undergraduate courses in phonetics, sociophonetics, and speech perception. She has been awarded the Trustees Teaching Award twice as well as the Morley Award for Outstanding Teaching in the ASURE Program. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.