Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.
She has directed at least twenty-five PhD dissertations to completion at Ohio State University.
Her early research focused on prosody and the development of the Tones and Boundary Indexes (ToBI) system of intonation transcription.
[2] Perhaps her most significant contribution to linguistics is the fact that in 1987, together with John Kingston, she organized the first Laboratory Phonology conference at Columbus, Ohio.
In 1988 she won a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.