Welcome to my website!
Latest news
- My proceedings paper “A first look at the prosody of focus and stress in Yami (Tao)” (with Argyro Katsika) from the Speech Prosody 2026 conference has now been published and is available here.
- I’m officially on the job market! I am open to academic positions (tenure-track, lecturer, postdoc) in Linguistics, Anthropology, or related fields (e.g. English, Modern Languages, East Asian Studies, etc.).
Hello!
I am a linguist and linguistic anthropologist. My research has largely centered around the language spoken by the Indigenous Tao/Yami islanders of Orchid Island, southeastern Taiwan, and I have steadily growing interests in the Otomanguean languages of Oaxaca, Mexico, especially spoken by the Mixtec & Zapotec diaspora in the United States. I am a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I am a member of the SPArK Phonetics Lab led by Dr. Argyro Katsika and the Language Documentation Lab led by Dr. Marianne Mithun, and I am an assistant director of the OLA (Ortografías en Lenguas Aborígenes) Lab led by Dr. Eric W. Campbell. I also regularly teach linguistics courses at the undergraduate level.
My research spans several different areas of linguistic inquiry. Here are a few topics I have worked on to greater detail:
- Acoustics and grammatical functions of word stress and prosodic prominence
- The expression of information structure (topic and focus)
- Case marking systems, specifically non-core case categories
- Clause chaining and other complex clause linkage strategies
Prior to my journey into academic & linguistic research, I was (and still am!) a classical flutist. During my musical career, I particularly enjoyed performing as an orchestral musician, and I was especially fond of performing opera.
Currently brewing:
- Dune Coffee Roasters (Santa Barbara, CA): Panama Elida Estate Natural Catuai