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 basis of language and where these linguistic abilities come from. More specifically, I want to study the intrinsic (biological) and extrinsic (sociocultural) pressures that constrain the development and evolution of communication systems, and how these systems modulate other cognitive processes such as thought. I also hope to leverage these insights to improve outcomes for people with cognitive-communicative deficits resulting from injury and/or disorder.

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 the differences in processing demands between language comprehension and production in both neurotypical populations and people with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Much of this work was done in collaboration with Prof. Melissa Duff in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

I earned my BS in neuroscience with a minor in linguistics from the University of Southern California. There, I worked in the Psycholinguistics 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.