Short Biography

I went to undergrad at the University of Nevada, Reno. During college, I volunteered at an immigration services office and helped translate documents for recent immigrants arriving to Northern Nevada. My volunteer experience made me interested in how the legal system could best serve the Latino population in Nevada. 

I wrote an honors thesis on translational inconsistencies between the Spanish and English language Miranda warnings ("you have the right to remain silent," etc) across Nevada police agencies.

The findings of my undergraduate research were published in Language and Law in 2021 and an updated version will be presented at the the American Psychology-Law Society in March 2026. 

I've always been interested in language and society. When I began grad school at the University of California, Davis, my interest moved into the fastest-growing population of speakers in the world: computers. I researched how listeners remember both content and voice qualities of synthetic voices in my Master's Thesis.

In my dissertation, I tested how listeners social evaluations of voices change based on whether the voice is a human or computer. 

Here's me doing a happy dance with my advisor, Dr. Georgia Zellou, and my cohort-mate Dr. Jules Vonessen at graduation.