About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of Arizona, specializing in Phonetics and Computational Linguistics. I expect to complete my Ph.D. in May 2027. I also earned an M.S. in Human Language Technology at the University of Arizona in 2025.

My research asks how humans and computational models process variable speech and recognize when the available information is insufficient for a reliable interpretation. For example, the word just can occur in very different reduced forms in spontaneous conversation, yet listeners often recognize it successfully.

In phonetics, I study how speech reduction varies with surrounding sounds and how listeners use acoustic cues to recognize reduced words. In computational linguistics, I investigate speech representations, automatic speech recognition (ASR) of spontaneous speech, and answerability monitoring in speech-reasoning models.

Research at a glance

• Speech production and perception: Phonetic reduction in conversational speech, especially context-dependent realizations of just and listeners’ responses to reduced forms.
• Speech representations and ASR: Whether explicit prosodic information benefits recognition beyond additional trainable model capacity.
• Reliable speech reasoning: Whether models can detect insufficient evidence during reasoning and reassess potentially unsupported answers.

My longer-term research interests include comparing human and machine recognition of spontaneous speech and developing speech-language models that respond adaptively to different sources of uncertainty.

Teaching and research experience

At the University of Arizona, I have been the instructor of record for Computational Linguistics (LING 438), Statistical Natural Language Processing (LING 439), and Introduction to Linguistics (LING 201). I have also worked as a graduate research assistant in the Douglass Phonetics Lab and as a speech-technology research intern at XRI Global, working with ASR for low-resource languages.