I am a researcher and teacher within the Linguistics Department. Much of my research focuses on the Romance language family, especially Romanian and Italian, but I increasingly investigate English in the Southern US. I am trained in generative linguistics, and I use large-scale phonetic datasets to understand phonological diversity in real-life speech. I have worked at the University of Oxford, where I held a postdoctoral position in the Phonetics Laboratory. I earned my Ph.D. in Linguistics at Cornell University in 2012, writing my dissertation on the historical development and synchronic phonetic & phonological reality of the Romanian vowel system. Prior to graduate school I worked at the Speech Communication Group at MIT, while I was an undergraduate at Wellesley College (B.A. 2004); and even longer ago, while still in high school, I realized that I wanted to explore my love of language by becoming a linguist! I am linked in multiple ways to John T. Hale.