Bio
I grew up in Canada on Treaty 6 territory. My postsecondary journey began with a year living in beautiful Nelson, BC, on the traditional unceded territory of the Ktunaxa Nation, to study textile arts. Then I went on to pursue another love: language.
I completed a BA (Hons.) in Linguistics & German Language and Literature at the University of Alberta, then I moved to Germany for an MA in Linguistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and an MSc in Cognitive Systems: Language, Learning, and Reasoning at the Universität Potsdam.
I came to Scotland to do my PhD at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Language Evolution. My research was supervised by Prof. Jennifer Culbertson and Prof. Simon Kirby. My PhD thesis is called Segmentation, rule formation, and the emergence of generalisation, and in it I investigated a range of language acquisition phenomena from a cognitive science perspective, asking how humans’ language learning and generalisation mechanisms might shape language itself.
Currently I’m a Lecturer (roughly equivalent to the North American assistant professor) in the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. I’m part of a teaching team responsible for leading undergraduate and postgraduate statistics courses for students in Psychology.
In my free time, I like to weave cloth, sew clothing, make quilts, and knit 🧶