I am a PhD student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. My advisor is Ted Gibson. I study psycholinguistics, or what processes in the mind are involved in language production and comprehension. Specifically, I’m interested in how we choose to phrase and produce a message that already exists in the mind, and how comprehenders capitalize on these decisions to better understand the intention of the producer.
In service of my research question, my interests span language production and comprehension, construction grammar, syntax, prosody, sign languages, and communication-based approaches to language such as noisy channel processing. I value cross-linguistic work, methodological rigor and diversity, and open science practices.
Teaching and mentoring are very close to my heart. These days I am a teaching assistant at MIT 9.59: Lab in Psycholinguistics. I love seeing students develop coding and statistics skills because, when I started college, I was set on avoiding CS and statistics completely. But thanks to my amazing and life-changing undergrad mentor (Mahzarin Banaji), I overcame my fears and acquired computational skills, which turned out to be one of the best things to have happened to me in college (so if you are reading this but you have no idea how/why to STEM, reach out :) ).
In the past, as an undergrad at Harvard, I have worked with Anthony Yacovone and Jesse Snedeker on language development and applying neural decoding to analysis of ERP data. I have also worked with Mahzarin Banaji for several years on implicit gender-fame stereotyping and implicit attitude acquisition.