What is your role in the lab? 

I am a postdoctoral research fellow. I work on the EEG (brainwave) projects from setting up the study to analyzing the data and writing about what it all means. I'm also a speech-language pathologist, so it's fun to apply my clinical knowledge to what I learn from brainwave data.

What excites you most about your work?

I love the impact our work has for the stuttering community—we tie in so many facets of many fields to improve our knowledge of stuttering, and it's amazing to see.

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

I love to read and to spoil my dogs. The books I read span fiction—I read enough nonfiction for work—and I enjoy collecting pretty editions of books! My dogs are Lily and Georgie. Lily's a rescue, and she's been with me since my undergraduate years, getting me through three degrees. Georgie's a newer addition. We adopted him during COVID, and now he's a complete Velcro dog.

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

If I'm being practical, I would love to take my computer programming knowledge to a new level, particularly in R. A more fun response may be to crochet in a straight line—for some reason, my epic weakness is I can only crochet in circles!

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

This might be a cop-out, but the brain! In the short time since I started grad school until now, so much has changed in the neuroscience literature. I can't imagine where we'll be in 20-30 years!