About

I am a lifelong student of language. I love to share my knowledge with students of equal passion. I have taught Chinese and Russian to students in grades 3-12, at the university level, as well as independent adult learners.

I traveled to An Cheathrú Rua (Co. Galway) to study Irish for the purpose of language revitalization, ancestral reclamation, and future translation projects. I hope to learn from the way Irish is protected and promoted, to be part of these efforts, and to apply what I learn to helping other communities.

I pursued graduate-level study at the Davis School of Russian at Middlebury College in Vermont. My work there focussed on developing a system to discern a more specific part of speech category for the “particles” found in the Russian language. The purpose of this work is to improve second language instruction, to assist in corpus tagging for the Russian National Corpus, and to improve theoretical understanding of the function of particles.

I received my first masters from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Chinese language and pedagogy. In my thesis, I proposed a new method of categorizing Mandarin coverbs, which exist in the space between verb and preposition. Using a three-pronged approach (semantic, syntactic, and morphologic), I assessed the behavior of seventeen common coverbs and mapped the results onto a spectral diagram in order to visualize the space between word classes. It is this approach that I applied to my work in Russian particles at Middlebury.

I was the Lab Manager at the Cognitive Science of Language Lab at the University of Maryland. There, I worked under Wing-Yee Chow running EEG experiments studying sentence processing. Our work explored the “bag of words” method of prediction and how this process is interrupted when a semantically surprising word is inserted at the end of an input string.

As an undergrad at UMass, I wrote my thesis on object marking in Uzbek and was part of a group of graduate students conducting fieldwork on Tshangla, an under-documented language of Eastern Bhutan.

Outside of language education and linguistic research, I am often found doing Taichi, painting Byzantine icons, singing Irish folksongs, running long distances slowly, and listening to just about every genre music.