Career Profile
I am a statistician and data scientist who specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with years of experience in training and deploying large language models in academia and industry. I spent fifteen years as a classroom teacher before returning to complete my PhD at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. I use NLP tools, including traditional ML and transformer models in educational tools and assessment, including predicting human ratings of text quality, question and answer generation, and sequence classification. I am also interested in statistical techniques such as multi-level modeling, structural equation modeling, item response theory, and many-facet Rasch measurement to examine rater effects in research and educational measurement. My secondary research interest is in using deep learning techniques to analyze speech acoustics, specifically in terms of prosody, phonology, and pragmatics of natural speech.
Research Experience
Worked under guidance of Professor Scott Crossley on multiple projects including:
- Worked on the Feedback Competition, a Kaggle competition to develop an AI essay annotation tool able to divide essays correctly and automatically into their discourse elements. Performed analysis on the corpus data using Python and R.
- Worked with the lab to develop iTELL, a framework for generating intelligent and interactive textbooks from expository texts provided by content creators.
Worked for The Learning Agency helping to administer the Schmidt Futures funded Tools Competition, a grant competition to develop educational technologies in assessment and learning science as part of a graduate research assistantship at Vanderbilt University.
Worked under Professor Scott Crossley, helping him with data analysis, transcription, research, and essay rating according to analytic rubrics.
Certifications and Awards
Worked with a team to develop automated scoring models to predict human scores of constructed responses provided by students explaining their reasoning during the NAEP Math assessment
Completed 9-month (3 summers) in-person Montessori teacher training for elementary grades through the Association Montessori Internationale
Projects
I am involved in a number of NLP and Data Science projects in Peabody College at Vanderbilt University and beyond.
Publications
Published papers in journals and conference proceedings