Background
A lifelong lover of words and language, I came to study human communication in a roundabout way. I majored in French and Italian as an undergraduate, but always found myself most interested in the social and cultural aspects of language use, which my undergraduate studies didn’t really address. After receiving my BA, I spent a year in Antwerp, Belgium as a Fulbright English Language Teaching Assistant. There, I solidified my interest in working on issues related to how people communicate effectively, and in university teaching. A year after I returned to the U.S., I started graduate school, where I dove headfirst into all things communication, language and social cognition. After completing my PhD, I joined the Communicology faculty at UH Mānoa in 2013.
Education
- PhD, Communication, University of California-Santa Barbara, 2013
- MA, Communication, University of California-Santa Barbara, 2010
- AB, French and Italian, Princeton University, 2006
Specializations
Communication accommodation; understanding; communication and aging; social identity and intergroup communication; and message processing.
Research
I study the process of human communication – how people process and produce messages, how people accommodate (adjust) their communication for one another, and how people create understanding. I focus on these issues in intergroup settings, which are situations in which people identify themselves and/or others as members of (different) social groups, rather than just as individuals. I am also interested in the role of communication in our collective ideas about age and aging, and the implications this has for social dynamics, social evaluations, and people’s subjective well-being. My research is grounded in communication accommodation theory (CAT); social psychological scholarship on intergroup attitudes and behavior explanation; and interdisciplinary work on cognitive science and cognition in communication.