What is your role in the lab? 

I am a postdoctoral research fellow, and my role is to conduct research in the lab while learning new research techniques and being mentored by Dr. Chang.

What excites you most about your work?

I love tackling challenging problems and finding engineering solutions—especially when the solutions are geared towards making quality of life better for people with motor speech disorders. I also love collaborating with all the amazing colleagues in SNL and beyond in U-M. It is a great environment to hone my research skills before I embark on my faculty career path.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?

I am a speech scientist by day and a yogi by night—I started doing heated yoga sculpt during the last few years of my PhD and have been obsessed with it ever since! I also persuaded some of my previous lab mates to join, and thus, it has become a frequent practice of mindfulness and socializing for me.  I am also a serious “Potterhead"—I am the same age as the actors of the movies (now you know my age!), have the first-edition copies of all the books, have visited the wizarding world of Harry Potter, and finished playing Hogwarts Legacy on my Xbox parallel to completing my dissertation. That said, I am also open to finding new hobbies that are uniquely available in Ann Arbor, so shoot any suggestions you have my way.

If you could learn one new skill overnight, what would you want it to be?

I love to travel and am a big fan of the great outdoors. If there is one skill I could get overnight, that would be hiking! I have accumulated a lot of hiking gear over the years and have attempted several hikes myself, but it would be nice to be able to do multiple-day hikes + camping in high altitudes.

Besides the unknowns around stuttering, what’s another scientific mystery that you find interesting?

I am fascinated about the mysteries of the human mind—the existence of consciousness, neuro oscillation variations during meditation, and the scientific investigation on life after death. I grew up in a surrounding with a lot of influence of Buddhist philosophy and as such am fascinated when science and Buddhist philosophies overlap.