I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and always enjoyed learning new languages and traveling. I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for my undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Spanish, which turned out to be a beautiful marriage of my research interests.
In my first year as an undergraduate, I decided on a whim to begin learning another, "harder", language- Hindi. A different script, different sentence structure, and totally different culture. With two languages under my belt (well, kinda), and a travel itch, I enrolled for two study abroad programs: first in Hyderabad, India, and then in Madrid, Spain. It was the experience of living abroad and juggling the various languages that made me aware of the fine balance between learning new languages and learning to control them; after returning from India I could barely speak Spanish anymore, and after returning from Spain, I could barely speak English!
I completed my Ph.D. at Penn state in 2018, and spent the last 2 years of my studies residing in Riverside, California as a visiting graduate student at UC-Riverside after our lab moved. In my research, I investigated many of the questions I found myself asking from my time abroad. Bonus: what better way to study bilingualism than traveling around the world to directly observe the various forms that bilingualism takes!
I moved to Seattle, Washington in July, 2018 to begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington with Chantel Prat and Rajesh Rao. Our project evaluated different ways of changing brain activity (electrical stimulation via tDCS, and brain training via neurofeedback) to optimize one's brain state for new language learning. The project came to an abrupt halt during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In October 2020, I accepted a position as a Language Data Researcher working on Alexa for Amazon. But, not before I took a month-long vacation to Barbados with Travis, where we lived a lavish, COVID-free lifestyle on the beach, making the best of the bad situation. I began the new position upon returning, at the beginning of December. My new role consists of designing workflows (aka coding schemas) used by human annotators (aka research assistants) to label the ground-truth signal used to train and test the mega-scale machine learning models that power Alexa. Beyond that, I identify patterns of human language use that can be leveraged into new features, or to find gaps in the current models.
In my first year as an undergraduate, I decided on a whim to begin learning another, "harder", language- Hindi. A different script, different sentence structure, and totally different culture. With two languages under my belt (well, kinda), and a travel itch, I enrolled for two study abroad programs: first in Hyderabad, India, and then in Madrid, Spain. It was the experience of living abroad and juggling the various languages that made me aware of the fine balance between learning new languages and learning to control them; after returning from India I could barely speak Spanish anymore, and after returning from Spain, I could barely speak English!
I completed my Ph.D. at Penn state in 2018, and spent the last 2 years of my studies residing in Riverside, California as a visiting graduate student at UC-Riverside after our lab moved. In my research, I investigated many of the questions I found myself asking from my time abroad. Bonus: what better way to study bilingualism than traveling around the world to directly observe the various forms that bilingualism takes!
I moved to Seattle, Washington in July, 2018 to begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington with Chantel Prat and Rajesh Rao. Our project evaluated different ways of changing brain activity (electrical stimulation via tDCS, and brain training via neurofeedback) to optimize one's brain state for new language learning. The project came to an abrupt halt during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In October 2020, I accepted a position as a Language Data Researcher working on Alexa for Amazon. But, not before I took a month-long vacation to Barbados with Travis, where we lived a lavish, COVID-free lifestyle on the beach, making the best of the bad situation. I began the new position upon returning, at the beginning of December. My new role consists of designing workflows (aka coding schemas) used by human annotators (aka research assistants) to label the ground-truth signal used to train and test the mega-scale machine learning models that power Alexa. Beyond that, I identify patterns of human language use that can be leveraged into new features, or to find gaps in the current models.