Hi there, I go by Van.

I was born and raised in the cool and flowery city of Baguio in the Philippines. After drawing lots to decide on a college, I moved to the Metro Manila region to study at Ateneo de Manila University, where I worked on degrees in applied physics and computer science.

A year into struggling with physics and writing code, my parents told me that we were moving to the United States. I took this as an exciting sign to leave writing code behind. I changed majors and studied psychology and philosophy at Saint Louis University, where I ran the gamut doing research on metacognition, stress, self-control, and aggression. But it was not until I had the fantastic fortune of working with Fernanda Ferreira in the summer of 2013 and explored individual differences in resolving ambiguous relative clauses that I realized I really wanted to study things related to language processing.

With that fire in my belly, I went straight from undergrad to work on my PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I worked with Peter Gordon on measurement and methodological issues in psycholinguistics. Joke’s on me because writing code and thinking about equations take up most of my work now, so it really came full circle.

While working on my PhD, I was also a researcher in the Natural Language Processing group at Educational Testing Service, supervised by Beata Beigman Klebanov and Anastassia Loukina. I worked on RelayReader™, a reading tutor app for developing readers that emulates the kind of turn-taking that caretakers do when reading with children.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Peabody College at Vanderbilt University working with Duane Watson and Emily Phillips-Galloway on novel measures of language exposure, evaluating the psychometric properties of various psycholinguistic measures, and modeling individual differences in language processing.

I am the first person in my family to get a PhD, and together with all other aspects of my identity, I am acutely cognizant of the challenges and lucky breaks that went with my specific experience. This drives my passion for promoting inclusive teaching and mentorship practices. I am committed to cultivating an equitable intellectual climate, where the contributions and perspectives of marginalized and underrepresented communities are sought, respected, and valued.

Outside of work, I love playing board games, strategy-based video games, karaoke, and watching reruns of The Great British Baking Show.