Dr. Bressmann studied Linguistics, Psychology, and Sociology at the universities of Freiburg, Bielefeld and Dublin and received his M. A. in Clinical Linguistics from the University of Bielefeld in 1995. After working as a speech therapist in different neurological rehabilitation centres, he joined the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Technology, Munich, as a clinical researcher. In 1999, he received a Ph. D. in Phonetics from the Department of Phonetics and Speech Communication at the University of Munich. He is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Toronto.