curriculum vitæ


Professional Experience

Sr. Computational Linguist (L5) @ Google (Remote)

2024-Present

Developing end-to-end brand safety solutions using ML modeling, GenAI, human computation and data science

  • Leading R&D projects that apply LLMs to complex semantic and visual classification problems
  • Ensuring that the Google Display Ads network to ensure that the is web fairly monetized and accessible for everybody

Research Associate @ University of Memphis: Institute for Intelligent Systems

2023-Present

Collaborating on research projects related to NLP and LLMs in the medical and financial domains

  • Completed first draft of a book under contract with MIT Press ("Language Technologies for Beginners")
  • Co-authored journal articles on medical NLP / ML and language patterns in ChatGPT and human-produced text

Analytical Linguist @ Google (Los Angeles, CA)

2017-2023

Architecte experiments to address research questions about advertising quality
Conducted statistical analyses on human evaluation data using R and Python
Developed interfaces to collect labeled data from a global rater workforce


Senior Data Scientist @ NarrativeWave (Irvine, CA)

2016-2017

Developed Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application using statistical modeling and natural language generation
Appliedlinguistic and statistical expertise to language generation for large, industrial machine analytics
Built forecasting models for sensor data using Python and R


Senior Data Scientist @ Tata Consultancy Services (Bentonville, AR)

2015-2016

Developed statistical modeling pipeline in R for business analytics
Mined big socio-demographic and transaction data for actionable insights
Standardized data science and analytics procedures for the world's largest retailer


Voice Engineer at Nuance Communications, Text-to-Speech R&D (Merelbeke, Belgium)

2013-2015

Mastered relevant R&D technical skills, including a complex, evolving speech synthesis environment
Collaborated with distributed, multi-national team to build 2 voices for well-known digital personal assistant
Provided linguistic expertise and took on major customer-facing role for reboot of the world's most heard synthetic voice


Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington

2009-2013

Initiated collaborative, multidisciplinary research resulting in publications, conference presentations and well-received funding applications
Led a team that revamped the sequence of beginners’ French classes
Taught French linguistics, French phonetics / phonology and pedagogy


Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2002-2009

Completed a dissertation project on mental linguistic maps and socio-phonetic perception in Parisian French
Taught French courses resulting in inclusion on excellent teacher list
Coordinated human resources, material creation and student outcome management for elementary and French phonetics classes


Education

Certificate in Machine Learning (Coursera Specialization)
Working through 8 comprehensive courses on scaleable machine learning algorithms with NLP applications in Python

Coursera Data Science Specialization
Online coursework in R Programming, Exploratory Data Analysis, Statistical Inference, Regression Models, Developing Data Products and Practical Machine Learning

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Department of French (Linguistics)
MA & Ph.D. - "Perceptions of Parisian French: From Language Attitudes to Speech Perception"

Furman University
BA in French and Political Science


Technical Skills

Artificial Languages: R, Python, SQL
Statistical Computation and Graphical Software: R (RStudio), Python (Jupyter Notebook), Octave, SPSS
Big Data Utilities: Hive, Spark
Version Control: Git (Github), Subversion Web Design Software: Shiny (web application framework for RStudio), HTML, CSS, XML
Acoustic Analysis Software: PRAAT, Akustyk, Cool Edit Pro, Audition, Nuance Vocalizer
Human Subject Research Software: DmDX, Matlab
Working knowledge of EEG recording and analysis


Natural Languages

Native / Near-native: English, French
Highly Proficient: Spanish
Conversational: Serbo-Croatian, German, Portuguese, Italian
Elementary: Dutch, Tamil
Reading Knowledge: Latin