Children around the world grow up with vastly different homes, families, and social networks, but nearly all of them will grow up to be healthy speakers of a language. What about children's minds makes this possible? And how we can best support them in their journeys? 

This is what I have spent my career researching. I study children in the first few years of their lives, when their capacity for learning language is at its greatest. I hope not only to understand more about the uniquely human capacity for language, but also to provide children with the support they need to become happy, healthy speakers of their language.

I received my PhD in Psychology from Harvard University under Dr. Jesse Snedeker and Dr. Elizabeth Spelke. My dissertation addressed heritable and environmental influences on the language development of children adopted internationally into the U.S. and children growing up in Ghana.

From 2024 to 2026, I was a Fyssen postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics at the ENS Paris with Dr. Alejandrina Cristia.

Currently, I am a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University with LEVANTE and the Language and Cognition Lab with Dr. Michael C. Frank.