I’m a language data professional with formal training in generative linguistics and an academic background in syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics and experimental methodologies. I am currently a Language Engineer II at Amazon Web Services, where I support NLU features for Amazon Transcribe, including those bundled under Contact Lens for Amazon Connect as well as Transcribe Call Analytics. I previously held a contract position on the Amazon Lex team, where I worked on language expansion for Lex and oversaw performance evaluation tasks for the Automated Chatbot Designer.

I’m the developer and maintainer of Mkdnflow, a plugin for the Neovim source code editor that enhances the navigation and management of any kind of collection of markdown files within Neovim (notebooks, journals, wikis, pre-rendered websites, etc.).

On the academic side, my interests include natural language syntax and semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and psycholinguistics, but I am especially interested in the syntax of long-distance dependencies. I am invested in the use of controlled experimental methodologies to gain insight into linguistic competence and its interfaces with performance systems, especially when informally collected judgments are unreliable or ambiguous. My dissertation (June 2021) investigates extraction from relative clauses in English in the context of related work on relative clauses in the North Germanic languages of Mainland Scandinavia (Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian), some Romance languages, and Hebrew. A related paper that I co-wrote with Ivy Sichel and Matt Wagers was recently published in a special islands issue of the MDPI publication Languages.

I have sometimes served as a Linguistics lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, where I received my doctorate.