Biography:
I am currently a first-year senior at the Pennsylvania State University. I am majoring in Linguistics as well as pursuing a minor in Arabic. For the past two years, I have been working in Janet van Hell's lab as a research assistant. This past December, I received word that my application for the PIRE grant was accepted and that I would be preforming research at the University of Granada in southern Spain during the summer of 2015. I will be researching the acoustic properties of code-switched sentences produced by Spanish-English bilinguals, in collaboration with Janet van Hell and Marianna Nadeu. In addition to testing bilinguals in Granada, I will be recruiting bilinguals at the Pennsylvania State University to determine how habitual code-switching can affect the acoustic properties of code-switched sentences. In addition to assisting in the research lab, I have been training at Josefik's Korean Tang Soo Do, a martial arts studio in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, for five years. I spent a year assisting in the management of a branch studio in Huntingdon, and have been teaching various classes for children and adults since receiving my black belt two years ago.
Outside of school and martial arts, I spend much of my time working at Lowe's Home Improvement. In my free time, I like to spend time with my dog, engaging in target practice, traveling to state parks, and photographing the outdoors. Additionally, I try to use my free time to amass film trivia and read through an ever- growing pile of books.