Linguistics PhD & cognitive neuroscientist turned A.I. engineer
This is my website where I'll share my CV, bio, and maybe an interesting thought or two!
About Me
In a few words:
Here's a mini-academic bio that I wrote back in 2014 that captures the arc of my academic career:
I was born in Mexico but moved to Texas as a child. My background in a bilingual household first inspired me to study linguistics. Today I am interested in how new experimental methods such as fMRI, EEG, MEG, and mass online questionnaires allow us to test linguistic theories from the 20th century like never before, and how these can be applied to the field of second language acquisition. The way I see it, an individual language teacher may teach somebody how to fish, but a psycholinguist could one day help "teach somebody how to teach somebody how to fish." In this way, I want to help give others access to the same opportunities I had as a speaker of the lingua franca in a linguistically unequal world.
Where I am now
I am currently an internal AI developer at Motive, a technology company oriented towards the trucking and logistics industry. As a simple fact of actuarial science, the more AI dashcams we sell, the safer the roads and the more lives we save.
From 2022-2024 I worked as a generative AI developer with Deloitte's Government & Public Services practice in Arlington, Virginia. There, I built various Large Language Model-powered software tools for state and federal government agencies.
In 2022-2023 I was a postdoc in Dr. Jon Brennan's Computational Neurolinguistics Lab at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor under a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, where my project involved combining automated computer transcription with portable wireless EEG to build a neurolinguistic database of naturalistic native and second language conversation.
In 2022 I completed a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Illinois - Chicago, where I enjoyed teaching second language and heritage Spanish while doing a dissertation on the neural indices of implicit vs. explicit second language grammar processing. Dissertation text here and defense recording here.
Before that, I got my master's in linguistics at the University of Cambridge and my bachelor's at Princeton, with a couple of years of English teaching in Vietnam and Korea along the way.