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I grew up in South Africa, a country with twelve official languages, where linguistic diversity was part of daily life. When I was a kid and someone asked what superpower I'd choose, my answer was a no-brainer: the power to know every language.

That conviction was tested early. I was thrown headfirst into a French school not knowing a word of the language, and I still remember wondering how long it would take until I could finally talk to all of my classmates, not just the ones who already knew English. That experience of being on the wrong side of a language barrier is part of what pulled me toward studying language in the first place.

I'm an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying statistics, linguistics, and computer science. My research lives in NLP and computational linguistics, but I'm equally interested in machine learning and AI engineering. I think a good research question unlocks another thousand more.

I'm affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and I'm currently working at the University of Chicago's ChatterLab on naturalistic conversational speech.