I am a post-doctoral researcher at Northwestern University‘s Neurology Department, making scientific and engineering advancements in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI) and its applications. I am specifically interested in enabling communication through neural prosthetics for speech.  I spearhead this project in the Slutzky Neuroprosthetics Lab at Northwestern, where we collaborate with researchers around the country on understanding the neural signals underlying speech production. Together with a team of neurologists, neurosurgeons, epileptologists, and medical technicians, I work on developing new methods using electrocorticography for identifying and characterizing speech-related areas in the brain. I am thankful to have financial support from the National Institutes of Health in the form of a NRSA Fellowship (F32 / NIDCD), and I am a proud advocate for public funding of scientific pursuits.

I love my work! If you’re interested in reading some of my contributions to the scientific literature in the field, check out my Google Scholar citations. My expertise includes signal processing, biosignal classification, machine learning, electrophysiology, and electrocorticography.

I’m a product of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Bioengineering Department, where I completed my PhD in neural engineering.  I worked under the advisement of Dr. Patrick Rousche and Dr. Jim Patton. I received much of my financial support during that time through the CTS-IGERT Fellowship.

In 2006-2007, I received a Fulbright Scholarship to study BCI in the lab of Prof. Andrea Kuebler in Tübingen, Germany, where I developed a browser that was controlled by the P300 signal.  There, I had the opportunity to work with people with ALS, and the experience has motivated much of my work to improve the information-transfer rate of BCI for communication.

Before that, I studied biomedical engineering and neuroscience at Duke University (Pratt ’06) and worked as a Pratt Fellow in the lab of Prof. Patrick Wolf.  I’ve also worked as a research intern at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under Prof. Christopher Moore and at the Walter A. Hoyt, Jr. Musculoskeletal Research Lab at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio.

Outside of the lab, you can find me performing music around Chicago, mentoring and coaching young women on and off the lacrosse field, and training for triathlons.