In my research, I investigate language and the brain, broadly speaking. With a background in linguistics and philosophy, my default is to reduce complex systems into tangible parts by working from first principles. As a highly application-oriented thinker, my aim is always to build something (a finding, a tool, a resource) that has real-world impact. 

Currently, I have four connected areas of activity. My PhD research takes gestures, which have established facilitative effects on mental processes, and asks whether we can use them to improve language testing with direct electrical stimulation (during awake brain surgeries). This project has started bottom-up by building the world's largest database of naturalistic gestures, and has already resulted in discoveries of new gesture types, their influence on psycholinguistic processes, and why we gesture at all. Next steps involve applying transcranial magnetic stimulation while gesturing to modulate language processes. 

In my role at the University of Southern California, we investigate the influence of embodied/sensorimotor semantics on metaphor processing in impaired populations. Our first project (in review) involved evaluating the processing of colour-blind people for metaphors involving colour, compared with colour-seeing people, ChatGPT, and painters. Our next study involves the processing of sound-related metaphors in d/Deaf people.

In 2023-24, collaborators and I won grant funding at Oxford University to combine psycholinguistics and syntax in a study about whether speaking a "pro-drop" language influences recognition memory ability.

During my MPhil at Cambridge University, I studied the psycholinguistics of idioms from the perspective of embodied semantics, asking whether idioms with action-related meanings are processed quicker/more accurately.