About

I am a postdoctoral fellow with the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I received my doctorate in speech-language-hearing sciences from the University of Minnesota, advised by Mx. Ben Munson. I am a certified speech-language pathologist with practical experience from two years working at an elementary school. While there, I became curious about children’s imitative behaviors in the speech room. My research investigates children’s vocal imitation when they repeat after adults and its association to both the child’s language learning and perception of the adult.

I began my college career at Purdue University, where I initially majored in Engineering. After discovering (very quickly) that Engineering was not my cup of tea, I switched into Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and never looked back. I spent a short time in two different research labs there before joining the Auditory Cognitive Neurosciences Laboratory with Dr. Natalya Kaganovich. I stayed at Purdue for my master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology and completed my master’s thesis on an ERP study investigating visual speech perception in children.

After graduating, I was hired at Horicon Elementary School in central Wisconsin as a Speech-Language Pathologist. I worked there for two years and got to know the district and the excellent birdwatching opportunities at the Horicon Marsh. I loved working with my students there, but knew that research in my future. I applied for doctoral programs and was accepted at the University of Minnesota.

I continued my journey northward in the middle of the pandemic, starting my doctoral program in Fall of 2020. I was advised by Mx. Ben Munson in the Studies in the Applied Sociolinguistics of Speech and Language Lab. I also worked closely with Dr. Lizbeth Finestack in the Child Language Intervention Lab, where I got to stay in touch with my clinical side by conducting grammatical language intervention sessions.