I began working at the University of Birmingham in 2016. I received an MA in General Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced. I also worked as a doctoral fellow and research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

For my work, I use data-science driven linguistics to study the intersection of language and cognition. My book Sensory Linguistics (John Benjamins) is an in-depth analysis of English sensory adjectives — how people talk about colors, tastes, smells, and other sensory impressions. For my Future Leaders Fellowship (starting 2021), I will investigate the multimodal communication of numerical information — how people talk about numbers and use graphs and gesture to drive data-driven decisions. A unifying theme across my work is a strong commitment to open science and reproducible research practices. I’ve also written an introductory textbook on statistical modeling, Statistics for Linguists (Routledge).