I am a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown, before which I was at the Department of Linguistics at UPenn.
My PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2015) is on the structure of the verb phrase in Chinese, and its similarities and differences with the verb phrase in other languages. As a graduate student, I worked on the ERC project Rethinking Comparative Syntax (PI: Ian Roberts), a project concerned with the status of parameters in contemporary theory. In 2014, I was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford.
My undergraduate studies were in modern and classical Chinese and Linguistics (SOAS, University of London; 2010). I also hold an MPhil in Linguistics (Cambridge; 2011), for which I wrote a dissertation on clause level distinctions in root/embedded syntax in Mandarin.
I was a visiting student at Beijing Normal University in the year 2007-2008. In 2006 I spent a semester teaching English as a Foreign Language at Guangxi University for Nationalities in Guangxi Province, China, and at its associated secondary school for students from minority nationality backgrounds. It was in Guangxi that I first discovered the diversity of linguistic varieties spoken in mainland China.