I was born in Rockville, Maryland, USA, where I completed my BA  degree in Communication Studies and Business Administration (2013) at the University of Maryland University College. After my undergraduate work, I spent five years working in the field of accounting before deciding to transition into academia. I moved to Barcelona and earned my MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2019).

       I am currently beginning my PhD work on the analysis of disfluency in speech across dementia types, under the supervision of Wolfram Hinzen. I am particularly interested in examining what disfluency can reveal about difficulties relating to discourse planning, syntactic complexity, and lexical retrieval. My research seeks to explore the relationship between disfluency in speech and cognitive decline, and to identify patterns of disfluency unique to each variant of dementia.