My research and teaching focus on human cognition, particularly with respect to speech and communication. These are inherently interdisciplinary topics - understanding the mind requires knowledge from neuroanatomical connections and electrophysiology to schools of philosophical thought and contemporary computer science; my particular study of language has involved physics, engineering, formal linguistics, fieldwork on Scandinavian languages in the North Atlantic, computer science, psychology, and the speech and hearing sciences. I believe that it is only when we bring these diverse views together that we can hope to unpack the complexities of humanity's cognitive underpinnings. Speech, for example, involves the mind, the brain, social pressures, the physics of sound transmission, and the particular language being spoken. Missing any of these pieces leaves us with a picture that is incomplete, at best, and misleading at worst.

My belief in the power of interdisciplinary inquiry has shaped my career so far (I was a Linguistics major as an undergraduate, completed a joint PhD in Linguistics and the Psychological & Brain Sciences, and am an active member in professional organizations from Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech & Hearing), and it continues to do so. I have a courtesy appointment in the Neuroscience Program, for example, in addition to my position in Psychology, and in 2020 I became the coordinator for the Cognitive Science minor at Trinity, where students can bring together courses from across the curriculum to create a rich scholarship surrounding the mind.