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I'm a third-year graduate student in the UCSD Computational Psycholinguistics Lab, working with Roger Levy. My research mostly relates to the issue of what it means to know a language. How is a language represented in the mind? How does one decide what to say in a given situation, or whether a sentence is grammatical? Where, if anywhere, should a distinction be drawn between competence and performance? These are pretty wide-open questions, of course; if you're interested in the specifics of my research, you can check out this page.

I majored in math as an undergraduate, and now I work in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Statistics. As such, I'm familiar with some common misconceptions about linguistics, and I'd like to take this opportunity to pre-empt them:

1. Linguists don't necessarily know a lot of languages. Personally, I only speak one. It is English, as you might have guessed. I can read a bit of French and Spanish, but unfortunately, conversation is way beyond me. I'm terrible at mimicking sounds from languages I don't know. This makes phonetics seem like brilliant magic to me.
2. Switching from math to linguistics is more common than you might think. The underpinings of each are remarkably similar, and many of the great advances in linguistics have been based on advances in mathematical logic, set theory, and other math stuff. Not only are a few other grad students here at UCSD former math majors, but some prominent linguists are as well.
3. I am not a strict grammarian; I am a descriptivist. That's not to say I have no grammar -- in fact, I run a grammar blog -- but I think it's imperative to differentiate between rules that are and aren't well-founded.

So that's my deal. You're welcome to see my research interests, learn a bit more about me, or investigate my personal dialect (idiolect), which is replete with oddities that come from my many wonderful years in Pittsburgh. Oh, and if you're trying to locate me in a crowd and don't find the picture to the left to be sufficiently identifying, here's a picture of me jumping.