My research interests are language description and documentation, endangered languages, historical and comparative linguistics, phonetics and phonology, phonological constituency, and Austroasiatic languages.

1. For my first qualifying paper, “The Segmental Status of Nasal-Obstruent Sound Patterns in Ikota”, I examined the nasal-obstruent sequences (i.e. mb, nd, ŋg) in Ikota, an understudied language of Gabon, to determine segmenthood.  For this work, I used all original data elicited from a speaker living in New York City, in collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance of NYC.
2. For my second qualifying paper, “The Sound Patterns of Romam: A Preliminary Investigation”, I studied the phonology and phonotactics of Romam, an undocumented Austroasiatic language spoken in Vietnam by an active community of approximately 200 speakers.  The transcription and analysis for this project will contribute to the Proto-North-Bahnaric dictionary in development by Paul Sidwell and his colleagues.
3. For my dissertation, I am working on a description of the sound patterns of Kaco’ (aka Kacho’, Kacok, Kachok), a endangered, undocumented Austroasiatic language spoken in Cambodia.  The dissertation includes a special focus on the syllable structure and prosodic structure of this language (and in turn, of similar and related languages), including the nature of the unit termed the sesquisyllable.  Kachok (my preferred choice in spelling) may or may not be the same language (with dialectal differences) as Romam.  This work is funded by the National Science Foundation by way of a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. Details about the Kachok research can be found here.