Me at Wheaton Metro station in DC, home to the longest escalators in the Western Hemisphere
I am an incoming PhD student in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. The areas of linguistics I'm most interested in are L1 acquisition, formal semantics, and syntax.
I have worked in Maryland's Language Acquisition Lab for five semesters plus the summer of 2025 under the direction of Jeffrey Lidz. The work I do focuses on children's acquisition of syntax and semantics, often investigated using preferential-looking and habituation-switch methods.
As an Honors Thesis project under the direction of Valentine Hacquard, I am looking at modal verb competence among 2-5y/os. In addition to quantifying their competence, we hope to determine which input factor(s) most strongly correlate with that competence.
In the summer of 2024, I worked as a research assistant in Elika Bergelson's lab at Harvard University. My project looked at speech input to young deaf/hard of hearing children who have recieved cochlear implants. I presented this work in a talk at BUCLD 50. [poster]
In the summer of 2023, I was part of a Computer Science NSF REU at Salisbury University. My group worked on a computer vision model to visually identify, classify, and track oysters in an underwater environment, with applications in aquaculture and environmental monitoring/protection.
Teaching
At UMD, I worked as a teaching assistant for Tonia Bleam for three semesters (see below), working with class sizes of 20-30 students. This involved grading weekly assignments and exams, holding office hours, and leading review sessions before exams.
LING240 - Language and Mind, Spring 2024 (~30 students)
LING311 - Syntax I, Fall 2024 (~20 students)
LING311 - Syntax I, Spring 2025 (~25 students)
Etc.
From Spring 2024 - Fall 2025, I was the representative of UMD's Linguistics Department on the Dean's Undergraduate Advisory Board within the College of Arts & Humanities.
When I'm not doing schoolwork I like to play chess, code hobby projects, and enjoy the outdoors. I'm also involved with Maryland's quizbowl team, and I'm a big fan of trivia in general.
