She studied Cognitive Science as an undergraduate and Linguistics at the graduate level. Before coming to Essex, she was was a postdoctoral research fellow in the University of California at Davis Department of Neurology Alzheimer’s Disease Center examining how language changes relate to aging and the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. Prior to that she taught as a lecturer in the Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology at UC Davis. She conducted her doctoral thesis (2009) on language ideologies and structural variation and change in the Indian English spoken by Hindi/English bilinguals in New Delhi, India.