UCLA Department of Linguistics | Graduate Researcher         (2019-)

​

PhonProv: A phonetic corpus of naturalistic infant-directed speech              

• Led a diverse team of 5 research assistants on an end-to-end research project, including developing and analyzing a database of 100,000+ tokens of speech, followed by a quantitative experiment

• Analyzed speech patterns to quantify the degree of phonetic variability and noisiness of 100,000+ tokens of speech directed at infants and pre-school aged children

• Manipulated and analyzed high-volume, high-dimensionality data from the corpus with self-developed code, using appropriate exploratory methods and statistical analyses in Python and R

• Independently designed and executed an infant speech processing experiment based on insights from the corpus analysis; designed stimuli; used Bayesian statistical models for data analysis

• Communicated findings to large group of stakeholders in compelling and creative ways

• Awarded $100,000+ in competitive grants and fellowships

4th Man Project: Event perception over development                  

• Designed and implemented an online survey and experiment using Labvanced and Prolific to investigate adults’ perception of complex event types to further understanding of multimodal language acquisition

• Designed child behavioral experiments to determine developmental trajectory of perception of these events

Computational modeling of developmental human sentence processing     

• Developed a top-down model of preschooler’s parsing difficulties with ambiguous sentences using natural language processing (NLP) tools to probe interactions of developing cognitive systems with language acquisition

• Implemented beam-search algorithms to generate testable empirical predictions for future experimental work

Kingsland Marketing Consultancy | Strategy Intern                   (2022)

• Worked cross-functionally with agency employees outside of the strategy department, clients, and vendor partners to execute several critical projects

• Wrote, led and supported the team with creative brand strategy documents, market research, competitive audits, mining for insights, customer archetyping, positioning, and more