About me

I graduated from Yale in 2006 with a B.A. in Computer Science and Psychology. As an undergraduate I performed research in human-robot interaction, working with Brian Scassellati, and unsupervised language learning, with Charles Yang. I also spent a tremendous amount of time working on the shows and serving on the board of the The Yale Dramat.

Between college and graduate school, I worked for the Microsoft Auto team on speech recognition and text-to-speech in cars, specifically on Ford Sync Gen1 and Kia UVO. I also worked with the Microsoft Research Speech Technology Group on CommuteUX.

I did my doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Mitch Marcus and Charles Yang. My thesis work combined insights from unsupervised learning, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics to build models of how we learn and process words. I then applied some of the insights from this work as post-doctoral fellow at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, developing models of how language is processed in the brain and applying it to autism research.

As a researcher at BBN Technologies and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, I broadened my focus to include more natural language processing research while continuing to study language processing and acquisition. In summer 2019, I joined the Computer Science faculty at Brandeis University as a tenure-track assistant professor.