I am a linguist and mentor at UC Riverside, where I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in Spanish Critical Sociolinguistics and Language Education in the LatCrit Sociocultural Linguistics Lab in the Center for Ideas and Society. 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.  I use both qualitative and experimental approaches to reveal how individuals' and groups' perception and use of language are ideologically charged.

I am also a researcher at  San Quentin Rehabilitation Center through Mount Tamalpais College (MTC) and through my community-based consulting business, Restorative Research Consulting (RRC). At MTC, Student Researchers and I are investigating the sociolinguistic labor of incarcerated people. As a consultant at RRC, I use best practices in program evaluation to provide the public with empirical findings about the benefits of rehabilitation and community-building. In both roles, I am guided by the tenets of Participatory Action Research to include the experts of incarceration in the research process. My goals are to provide incarcerated students with new opportunities, bring experiences from inside the prison to the forefront of research, offer research experience to those who are underrepresented in the process, and examine the benefits of research as a rehabilitative process.