Hello! Welcome to my academic homepage. Here you'll find some information about my research interests and current projects. I finished my Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, department of in December of 2016, where I worked in the spontaneous communication lab with Dr. Jean E. Fox Tree. This page presents a collection of the research I conducted there, some of which is continuing to develop today!

Research Interests

I'm interested in how we use language to interact with each other and get things done, whether in the context of day to day chitchat or in specific, goal-oriented collaborative activity. My goal is to understand meaning making as a social, collaborative activity. Bringing spontaneously produced conversation into the lab can be a little like herding cats, but I always try to use natural dialogue as a starting point for experiments. I'm also interested in the use and coordination of multiple communicative modalities in conversation, such as gesture, prosody, and gaze, all of which play a big role in shaping how words spoken in a particular context become a meaningful part of an interaction. Check out my research page for more information on specific projects that are under way.