Note: this is my old website from my time as a CMU Ph.D. student. Stay tuned for my new website about my current work as a freelance writer, an instructor & curriculum consultant with the MIT Communication Lab, and a Fellow for Technology, Energy, and Society with SAFE!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Jaime Carbonell and Lori Levin on the semantics of natural-language text. Specifically, I use ideas inspired by Construction Grammar to annotate and automatically parse relationships of cause and effect. We express these relationships through a huge variety of linguistic patterns, making them a particularly challenging area of semantics.

Before starting at CMU, I graduated from MIT with a major in computer science.

In addition to my computer science work, I believe firmly in the need for STEM practitioners to engage with the rest of society, and I have helped run several science communication programs. I also do some freelance science writing.