Professional:

I am a quantitative social scientist, and I hold a PhD from the Linguistics department at the University of Pennsylvania. I currently work for CulturePoint as a principle consultant, and I am a lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, where I teach courses on diversity and inclusion as mission critical leadership competencies.

My dissertation research was on regional variation in African American English. I tried to answer: what are the dialect regions? How do they relate to the Great Migration? How are they different from White dialect regions? How are these patterns related to segregation? I argued that AAE comprises multiple accents and multiple dialect regions, which pattern with movement of people during the Great Migration.

My other research interests are eclectic and interdisciplinary; it's hard to find a topic in linguistics I'm not interested in. My research interests include Probabilistic and Game Theoretic approaches to Pragmatics (specifically, implicature, 'dog whistle,'  euphemism, and microaggression), Evolutionary Game Theoretic approaches to modeling language change and variation, social stratification in language, various topics in African American Vernacular English, tonal phenomena in Mandarin, and Bantu Morphosyntax. Much of my recent research has been sociophonetics, or language change from the interplay of various interfaces (e.g., phonological reanalysis feeding syntactic reanalysis). My research on court reporter misunderstanding and mistranscription of African American English was covered by the New York Times, NPR, NBC, Vice News Tonight, and others.

My academicd advisors were Robin Clark and William Labov, and my committee members are Mark Liberman, and Hiram Smith.

Personal:

I came to linguistics late. I spent the previous 10 years as a struggling jazz musician (what jazz musician isn't?) and more recently as a research assistant and facilitator for a Diversity & Inclusion consulting firm that specializes in high performance through effective management of diverse workforces -- with a significant number of government and military clients.

I am an army brat who grew up moving every two years, and who spent a lot of formative time in AAE speech communities; I speak some slightly southern version of 'General American' and AAE, and am fluent in French. When asked how many languages I speak, I generally answer that I speak a little bit of a lot of languages, and a lot of two. My undergraduate degree is a Specialist degree in East Asian Studies (specifically, China studies) from University of Toronto, cum laude.