I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I'm primarily a descriptive linguist specializing in Alaskan Athabascan languages. My approach to language description examines field-collected data and archived materials in a discourse-functional theoretical framework. I consider language to be a human behavioral phenomenon to be studied in the context of discourse and society, and I see grammatical structure as a product of the cultural and linguistic practices of the members of a speech community.

I am also dedicated to supporting a technological infrastructure for field linguistics that promotes long-term data sustainability and interoperability (especially for endangered language data), and in my fieldwork I try to bridge the gap between linguistics, archiving, technology and community language activism.

I work mainly on Northern Athabascan languages. In 2008 I began my dissertation fieldwork with speakers of Ahtna in Alaska's Copper River valley. Between 2004 and 2006 I worked on the Dena'ina Archiving, Training and Access project, which included developing the Qenaga.org website and archive, teaching language technology, and conducting fieldwork.

In the past few years I've been working on Kannada, Khalkha Mongolian and Ladin Fascian as well. I'm an out-of-practice Italian speaker, and I studied French and Hebrew in my youth.