I am a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. I specialize in language documentation and description, gesture studies, and multimodality. My other areas of interest include cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, multimodality, sociolinguistics, language contact, bilingualism, Hispanic linguistics and anthropology. 

I hold a PhD from the University of Alberta and my dissertation Embodied discourse and viewpoint in Northern Pastaza Kichwa storytelling was selected for the Society for the Study of the Indigneous Languages of the America's 2025 Mary R. Haas book award.

I also hold MA and BA degrees in Linguistics from Brigham Young University and my professional background is in the translation and localization industry. My native language is English and I am a fluent speaker of Spanish and posses intermediate fluency in Ecuadorian Quechua (Kichwa/Quichua). 

As a usage-based descriptive linguist, I seek to not only describe features and constructions that languages have, but rather, describe what people do with language and how their language use relates to their cultural and material conditions.