I earned my doctorate in Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences in 2013 from University College London (UCL), United Kingdom. My doctoral research examined effects of sign language experience and deafness on perception of handshapes in British Sign Language, and this work would not be possible without generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the UCL Graduate Scholarship Award. Currently, I hold a full-time research position as a Research Scientist in the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience (LLCN) at San Diego State University, where I examine how augmented sensory experiences, for example, due to congenital deafness, impact aspects of visual perception, cognition and language processing (spoken, signed or written). Moreover, a proportion of my research is dedicated to examining questions related to modality-general (e.g. frequency or semantic relation) vs. modality-specific (e.g. iconicity) properties of language using sign languages as a window into the human mind. This line of work stems from our award-winning collaborative project, ASL-LEX (asl-lex.org), which promises to construct a large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language and offer an invaluable resource for educators, students, and scientists interested in exploring questions concerning lexicons, language acquisition, machine learning or computer vision. My research combines psycholinguistic, electrophysiological, motion-tracking methodologies and statistical modeling to advance our understanding of the brain’s plasticity following unique perceptual or developmental challenges

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