I am a community-based educator and researcher invested in understanding how language and power operate to oppress some people and cultures and elevate others. I also work closely with incarcerated individuals on changemaking movement building inside and outside of prisons rooted in abolition and community focus.

I received my PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UC Berkeley, where I completed a dissertation entitled, Investigating Deficit Perspectives and Raciolinguistic Ideologies Through Language Attitude Study under the advising of Dr. Justin Davidson, wherein I used a raciolinguistic perspective to examine how listening subjects use their perceptions of race, gender, and alleged 'deficits' to form attitudes about language and people. 

From 2023-2025, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the LatCrit Sociocultural Linguistics Lab under the advising of Dr. Claudia Holguín Mendoza, where I used a usage-based linguistics approach to examine language as a sociopragmatic function  in Mexican-US borderlands discourse media.  During this appointment, I was Principal Investigator of a participatory action research project at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where a team of incarcerated/paroled research assistants and I examined how language, surveillance, and innovation interact in prison interactions.

In my role as a researcher and consultant, I work with the community to evaluate grassroot programs. My goals are offer opportunities to those who have the most to gain from equity-centered research and to drive progressive policy change with empirical findings. Find more information about what I do as a consultant here.