I’m a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’m originally from Rochester, NY and received my BS in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. I received my PhD in Cognition and Perception from the Dept. of Psychology at the University of Iowa where I worked with Prof. Bob McMurray.

My research focuses on speech perception and spoken word recognition and examines several questions about these processes: How do listeners map sounds onto words? How do they deal with variability across different contexts? How do they combine multiple acoustic cues? How do they learn to do all of this?

To answer these questions, I use several approaches to examine the time-course of speech processing as it unfolds: event-related brain potentials that give us measures of perceptual encoding and categorization, and eye-movements that tell us about lexical activation. These experiments support several computational models (recurrent neural networks and statistical models) that describe how speech is learned and processed.