Hi and welcome to my website! Currently I am completing my doctorate in the Program in Indo-European Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles under the direction of H. Craig Melchert. My dissertation is entitled “Reconstructing Indo-European Syllabification”, which I will complete by June of 2010.

I entered the field of Indo-European linguistics with a strong background as a linguistics major at the University of Georgia. After a year of study in Pavia, Italy on a Fulbright fellowship and a year as a visiting graduate student at Harvard University, I came to UCLA. Here I have intensively studied a number of Indo-European languages and cultures as well as theoretical linguistics. By the time I finish my degree, I will have taken many courses in phonological, phonetic and syntactic theory as well as courses in field methods, in which I studied the Georgian and Akimel O’odham (Pima) languages with Pam Munro. I thus have a background balanced between a detailed knowledge of ancient languages and contemporary linguistic theory, which has directed my research to a topic that integrates both fields.