About Me
I am currently a Technical Research Associate at MIT working with Prof. Evelina (Ev) Fedorenko in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
I am broadly interested in the neural bases of langauge and where these linguistic abilities come from. More specifically, I want to:
- Understand the neural correlates and computations that allow for efficient and effective language use behaviors across a wide range of contexts.
- Develop a rich account of cognitive-communicative evolution in both human and non-human animals using insights from evolutionary biology and philosophy.
- Leverage these findings for improving outcomes in atypical and clinical populations for whom language use is impaired.
Before coming to MIT, I was the Lab Manager for the Conversation lab with Prof. Sarah Brown-Schmidt in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Our work focused on understanding the differences in processing demands between language comprehension and production in both neurotypical populations and people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
I completed my BS in neuroscience with a minor in linguistics at the University of Southern California. There, I worked in the Psycholingusitics of Mono- and Multilingualism Lab with Prof. Zuzanna Fuchs studying how noun classification systems such as grammatical gender are instantiated in the grammars of both monolingual and multilingual speakers. I also worked in the Laboratory of Neuroimaging with Prof. Jeiran Choupan and Prof. Kirsten Lynch studying perivascular spaces (PVS) and their relationship with cerebrovasculature.