I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computing and Software. I am currently working on an NIH-funded project investigating the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in aging.
Prior to joining McMaster, I completed my PhD in Linguistics at New York University (NYU), and before that I obtained an MS and BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). In my dissertation, I studied how the brain constructs sentential representations when participants view multiple words simultaneously.
Broadly, I am interested in how the human brain creates complex linguistic meaning from elementary representations. Our brains transform sound waves, markings on a page, or even tactile patterns into abstract linguistic representations, which are then combined together into larger structures. My goal is to understand how the brain transforms these external signals into abstract linguistic representations and how it combines them into sentences. To address these questions, I draw heavily from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational modeling.