Me at Wheaton Metro station in DC, home to the longest escalators in the Western Hemisphere
I am a first-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego where I am advised by Rachel Dudley. The areas of linguistics I am most interested in are L1 acquisition, formal semantics, and syntax.
I worked in Maryland's Language Acquisition Lab for most of my undergrad career under the direction of Jeffrey Lidz. The work I did focused on children's acquisition of syntax and semantics, often investigated using preferential-looking and habituation-switch methods. I will be presenting some of this work focused on children's knowledge of wh-islands in a talk at BUCLD 51.
My Honors Thesis at Maryland was directed by Valentine Hacquard and focused on modal verb competence in children aged 2-5 years old. I discussed this work in a presentation the department in May 2026.
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]
Teaching
University of California, San Diego
I am a teaching assistant at UC San Diego where my responsibilities involve grading, writing questions for assignments, and holding office hours.
LIGN-007 - Sign Languages and their Cultures (IoR Deniz İlkbaşaran)
University of Maryland
I worked as a teaching assistant for Tonia Bleam for three semesters (see below) while at Maryland, 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
LING311 - Syntax I, Fall 2024
LING311 - Syntax I, Spring 2025
Etc.
I currently serve on the UCSD Linguistics Department's Colloquium Committee. 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 & baseball, take photos (mostly of trains), and enjoy the outdoors. I was involved with the quizbowl team at Maryland, and I'm a big fan of trivia in general.
