Hello!
I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. I'm also affiliated with the Berkeley Armenian Studies Program and enrolled in the Designated Emphasis in Language Revitalization. For the 2025-2026 Academic Year, I am working for the GSI Teaching and Resource Center as a Teaching Consultant, helping Graduate Student Instructors to improve their teaching.
My primary research areas are sociolinguistics, phonetics, and language revitalization. My dissertation research studies Armenian as spoken in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the dynamics of language maintenance and shift in this community. I also have ongoing projects on (Inland North) English and West African Languages. I am committed to exploring how research can connect researchers and students with local speech communities for mutual benefit. My research generally involves a combination of fieldwork and quantitative/computational methods.
I am the founder and director of the Armenian Language in the Bay Area (ALBA) project – check it out here!
Before graduate school, I worked for two years at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) as a research assistant, where I contributed to the ASHA Evidence Maps.
I have an M.A. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Rochester; a Campus Times article reported on my undergraduate research.
Outside of linguistics, my favorite activities these days are hiking, social dancing (swing and contra dance in particular), and playing with my cat.
I respectfully acknowledge that I live, work, and study on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people.