Welcome! ¡Bienvenid@s!

I am Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education and TESOL at the Touro University Graduate School of Education where my research broadly focuses on bilingual language development in children. I am specifically interested in exploring the factors that contribute to bilingual language acquisition in multilingual learners in Latin@ communities, and how our schools can foster bilingualism and support heritage language maintenance. As a heritage speaker of Spanish myself, I believe that increasing our understanding of bilingual development has direct implications for successful academic outcomes, language policy and pedagogy, as well as bilingual, multicultural and dual language education.

My work has been published in a range of international academic journals on linguistics and education, and I was recently featured in an article in U.S. News and World Report. I am the recipient of various research grants including the GAANN Fellowship from the US Department of Education, the P.E.O. Scholar Award, the ACLS Emerging Voices Research Award and the Touro University Presidential Research Development Grant.

Before earning my PhD in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition at Rutgers University, I was a professional flamenco dancer and lived in Madrid for nearly 10 years where I founded a creative language education method for learning through movement called Hello! English. I earned my BA from George Mason University and my MA from New York University.

You can read my faculty profile at Touro University here.