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Welcome! I am a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics, with a specialization in Data Science, from UC Santa Cruz in 2026.
My research investigates how speech representations are learned and organized in the mind. Using computational modeling and behavioral experiments—with an empirical focus on the under-resourced languages of Pakistan—I examine what linguistic and social information is encoded in speech representations, how those representations support speech production and perception, and how insights from human cognition can inform the development of more effective automatic speech recognition systems.
Across these projects, I ask a common set of questions: What information is encoded in speech representations? How abstract or detailed can those representations be? How are they learned? And how can insights from human language inform the design of better AI models?
A central commitment of my research is supporting understudied languages through documentation, community collaboration, and the development of language technology. To this end, I work closely with speakers and communities in Pakistan to document and analyze interesting linguistic features, to develop language resources, and to create computational tools that contribute to language preservation and revitalization.