Dr. Judith Butterworth has been a research associate at the Mercator Institute for Literacy and Language Education since 2016 and is responsible for coordinating the publication series, the Lernertexte research database, and the specialist group Language Education for Newly Immigrated Children and Adolescents as part of the BiSS-Transfer initiative. From 2016 to 2023, her focus was on her work as personal assistant to the director Prof. Dr. Michael Becker-Mrotzek.

Previous stations of her university career were two DFG projects on spoken German: the project Gesprochener Standard at the University of Koblenz-Landau and the collaborative project Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland at the University of Potsdam. She received her doctorate in 2013 with a thesis on speech reproduction in interaction. As an additional qualification to her studies in linguistics, literature, and philosophy, she completed the continuing education program German as a Second and Foreign Language at the University of Bonn in 2014.