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I earned my BSc in Psychology with honors from the University of Buffalo. After graduation, I worked in a residential treatment center for juvenile offenders in New York. This arduous work led me to the realization that I desired a career in scientific research. So, I embarked on my PhD in Cognitive Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Alexander Pollatsek at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where I also earned a minor in Quantitative Analysis. During my PhD studies, I also had the pleasure of completing a summer internship program at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View California where I worked under the supervision of Dr. Cynthia Null. After earning my PhD, I accepted a Post-Doc position at the University of California at San Diego with Keith Rayner, where I further honed my skills as an eye movement researcher. In 2011, I accepted a post as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama establishing a new Psycholinguistics lab there and further developing my teaching abilities. I joined the Psychology Department of Bournemouth University in August of 2015. I serve as the leader of the Bournemouth University Reading Research Group, and I am a member of numerous committees within the Faculty of Science and Technology.

My research focuses primarily on eye movements during reading, and I am interested in advancing the field of psycholinguistics through the implementation and testing of computational models. I am particularly interested in the processing of abbreviations such as textisms and acronyms as they provide unique opportunities to explore the processing of orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations. I have also been exploring how differences in reading perspective (what readers are interested in) influence reading comprehension (including the cross cultural influences that often drive differences in perspective). Efficient reading requires a number of complex cognitive processes operating in harmony. To that effect, much of my research has focused on how the interplay between bottom-up (font characteristics) and top-down (language characteristics) information influence both foveal and parafoveal processing.