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Software Developer & Staff Linguist at Vocabulary Systems, Inc.
2015-2016
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Prior Experience
Overview​
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During the first year of my postdoc, I also worked part-time for Vocabulary Systems, a tech startup that is building smartphone- and tablet-based games for the learning of vocabulary for English language learners. During this time, I developed software for processing data sourced from various semantic databases for input to our proprietary database.
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Linguistics Graduate Program, University of California, Santa Barbara
2008-2015
02
Overview​
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I completed my Master’s in 2011 and my PhD in 2015 in the Linguistics Program at UCSB. At the Master’s level, I worked primarily within the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, with a journal article publication and a Master’s thesis within these areas. During this time, however, I became fascinated by the cognition of language, quantitative methods, and computational linguistics. Thus, as I progressed to the PhD program, I changed my focus. I published a journal article on the relationship between prosody and multi-word expressions, and I completed a dissertation on methods for the bottom-up extraction of multi-word expressions from language corpora. I also taught and served as TA for numerous undergraduate- and graduate-level classes at the university.
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Pedagogical Materials Developer, How Languages Work, Cambridge Univ. Press 2014
2013-2014
03
Overview​
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I worked for the editor of this introductory linguistics textbook, producing online supplemental materials for numerous chapters. These materials included lecture slides, quizzes, and test questions.
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Pedagogical Materials Developer, Open English
2012-2013
04
Overview​
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Along with a team of other cognitive linguists, I designed and built online educational games for English Language Learners for Open English, one of the leading companies offering online English language instruction.
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ESL Instructor, São Paulo, Brazil
2006-2007
05
Overview​
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Prior to graduate school, I lived in São Paulo, Brazil for 2 years, where I worked as an English teacher at several private language schools.
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Overview​
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I pursed my undergraduate studies at Tulane University, where I double-majored in linguistics and Portuguese. I also completed minors in French, Spanish, and African and African Diaspora Studies.
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